A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a full accounting of our — and the Internet’s — recent obsessions, including industrial foam, pastel geometrics, and representational images of plants. 

Discoveries

Though we adore the commercial and editorial work that London-based set designer Anna Lomax and photographer Jess Bonham do together (remember those cute Kenzo GIFs?), we like it even better when the two team up with no higher power in charge. Their latest personal project, called Water Features, developed from a desire to create something “darker and more mysterious than the colorful and optimistic world that Anna and I usually occupy together,” says Bonham. “We continued to work with some of our favorite materials such as glass, steel, and neon, but we were keen to incorporate something fluid and organic into these rather masculine environments we were building. The use of water offered us the opportunity to create frozen moments in time, which both occupies and becomes a part of the constructed spaces.” Click here for even more images.

Speaking of masterful collaborations, we were happy to see that one of our favorite ceramicists, San Francisco–based Ian McDonald, was presenting 45 pieces of new work this weekend at Totokaelo in Seattle. The forms remind us of hardware components taken to a more sculptural level, and underscore how much McDonald is pushing the medium. Seriously, go to his website (or his Instagram) now for a more comprehensive look at the new work.

We have Donald Judd on the brain, having recently made the pilgrimage to the artist’s incredible foundation at 101 Spring Street, so we were happy to see this pretty Judd homage, debuting this week at the Istanbul Design Biennale. A preview of an upcoming collaboration between New Tendency and Berlin-based architect Markus Miessen, “Revamping Donald” takes Judd’s aesthetic and philosophy as a starting point for a conversation about the functionality of furniture-scale objects.
Dutch Design Week wrapped up earlier this week, and one of the standouts was the Stone & Foam project by Design Academy Eindhoven grad Pieteke Korte. Though much has been made of the aesthetic similarity between industrial foam and lightly veined marble, we were still tickled by these cute combinations of lightness and weight.
Speaking of foam, a very long trip down the rabbit hole of the Internet introduced us to German multimedia artist Katja Windau this week. This article on Trendland, which documents her Mondrian-inspired digital collages of colored foam, is old but worth a peek.

Links

In need of some serious house porn? Pick up the new book from Freunde von Freunden, which features gems like this Buenos Aires home belonging to an Argentine designer and architect. Yatzer has a good sneak peek of the book, which includes lots of contributions by one our own contributors, Brian W. Ferry.

Another of our beloved contributors, photographer Michael A. Muller updated his website with new work this week, which includes this story for Remodelista on the fantastic new Iko Iko space in Los Angeles.

We typically read the blog Hither & Thither for Ashley Bruin’s fellow adventures in raising 3-year-old boy, but once in a while, the site intersects with our professional interests as well. This week featured an interview with someone we’ve had our eye on for a while, Brooklyn-based textile designer Rebecca Atwood. We liked this peek at Atwood’s process, above.

Exhibitions

The Perez Art Museum in Miami has two must-see exhibitions on right now. The first is Nicole Cherubini, whom we discovered earlier this year at the NYC Makers biennial at the Museum of Art & Design. We love this wall piece by her in earthenware, glaze, spray paint, and pine.

The second is by Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer, whose excellent exhibition “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” is making its American debut. “His recent sculptures and installations have included kinetic elements that are often choreographed with sound. These pieces become theater plays or small operas with uncanny objects as their main performers. Creating mysterious and, at times, sinister environments, the artist’s work responds dynamically to the architectural and cultural contexts in which it is produced.”

Our love for David Kordansky in Los Angeles continues apace: The gallery’s new show focuses on Jonas Wood, whose representational images of plants are among our favorites. (And there’s nothing we love more than a plant painting!)

Instagrams

An independent Australian online publication focused on supporting emerging fashion, art, photography, and design, Pitch Zine is basically the Down Under version of Sight Unseen, with an even more fervent love for pastels. Their Instagram has been introducing us to some major talents, like Akatre Studio, above.

Who is @puremagenta? From following her Instagram we know the basics: LA resident, senior art director at Nasty Gal, recent bride in the most awesomely art directed wedding we’ve ever seen. We’ll be doing a full story soon, but for now, follow along on her beautifully composed adventures here.

Finally, we’ve recently become obsessed with the Instagram of New York artist Eric Cahan and we think you should too. He not only frequently previews his own work (Cahan’s become primarily known for his Sky Series), he also documents his rounds of the studios of his New York contemporaries, like Peter Demos or Greg Bogin, whose work is shown above. Highly recommended.