Our first-ever From the Archives post, which looked back at William Sklaroff’s mid-century desk accessory set Radius One, dates back to November 10, 2009 — the very first day of Sight Unseen’s existence. But after that, the column pretty much petered out, partly because we didn’t have the time to research it properly and partly because, with millions upon millions of wonderful old things to potentially highlight, how could we ever choose just one? We’ve officially solved that problem today with the launch of our new and improved From the Archives series, in which designers and artists do all the work for us: Each edition will invite a talent we admire to give a history lesson on someone from the past who’s had a strong impact on their work. Our first subject is Brooklyn glassmaker Andrew O. Hughes, speaking about the California Light and Space sculptor DeWain Valentine (no holiday-themed pun intended).
After studying glass at RISD, Hughes moved to New York in 2001 and honed his skills by working for others on sculptures, antique restoration projects, and a bizarre art piece that involved him knitting hog intestines for six months. It wasn’t until 2006 that a fateful and lucrative job playing a glassblower in a Michelob commercial allowed him to set up his own studio — through which he’s created pieces for himself, for Calvin Klein Home, and for commissions from the likes of Stephen Burks and Roman + Williams — and eventually end up showing at Sight Unseen OFFSITE last May. That was where we first heard Hughes speak about his love for Valentine, who had partially inspired the Prism Candlesticks he was debuting at our show.
Here, Hughes tells us all the details of his love affair (no pun intended pt. II) with the sculptor’s work, starting with how he first discovered it: “I was visiting a rep and on his coffee table was an invite to a DeWain Valentine show in Paris with a peach-colored Diamond Column on it,” Hughes says. “I had been working on triangular cast-glass candlesticks at the time, and when I saw the sculpture it felt like the realization of my vision. Though I was a big fan of other California Light and Space Artists, like James Turrell and John McCraken, I had never heard of Valentine and was enthralled. As it turns out, his work has had a bit of a recent revival, and oddly enough, after much innovation in polyurethane, he’s moved on to glass as his main medium of expression. Full-circle serendipity.”
Who is DeWain Valentine? “DeWain Valentine is a sculptor who rose to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s as part of the California Light and Space movement. Originally from Ft. Collins, Colorado, he began making sculptures out materials from boat shops, like fiberglass and plastic. He made a stab at the New York scene, but Southern California proved to be the place where he found other artists working in new materials conveying transparency.”
“He got his first solo show at the famous Ace Gallery of Los Angeles in 1968. By 1970, he was working with a local plastics supplier to develop a new polyester resin that could remain stable when cast in huge pieces. This resin, which bore Valentine’s name in the plastic company catalog, was revolutionary for what was possible in plastic. Accordingly, he made some massive sculptures afterwards, some getting close to two tons. In his later life he’s worked more with flat glass as the medium for his transparency studies.”
Why does his work matter? “Because he was a real innovator — an artist whose vision transcended the materials available to him. Through experimentation he was able to make a medium that could convey the purity of color and form, and the distortion through which our perception relates to it and makes it whole.”
“He, and many others of the ‘Los Angeles Look,’ were criticized for having a so-called ‘Finish Fetish’ — an obsession with slick, perfect surfaces despite their work being handmade — but I think Valentine really pushed that medium as far as it could go. Being a medium-specific artist and designer, I really respect that.”
What are your three favorite pieces of his, and why? “He has several sculptures called Diamond Columns from the 1970s that are all amazing and are my biggest inspirations. I think they’re the most inspiring in how they emphasize form devolving into color and our perception of it. When you see a photo of them you don’t see a shape, you see color, light — the ephemera. The shape is unimportant, to me; it’s all about the color and how it disappears.”
“His 3,500-pound Gray Column from 1978, which had once been two columns until the other one was damaged, is just a stunning display of what’s possible with fearless determination — and a lot of polishing compound.”
“An earlier, smaller work, Valentine’s Ring Agate from 1968 was the first piece of his that I was familiar with, without knowing who had made it. I saw one in clear plastic in a showroom years ago, and I remember expecting it to be glass, and being drawn to how it distorted the colors of its surroundings to evoke the perception of depth and weight.”
How has his work influenced your own? “Mass, color, transparency, and perception were the vital aspects of DeWain’s work that I find most influential. How a piece is going to react to its environment, light, refraction, perception, and color is a real guessing game when you’re working with glass, and the discovery of a piece’s final realization can be a magical experience. I get so excited as a piece goes from a rough casting or a blown blank of glass to a realized object. As each successive layer is polished away and the perfect surface reveals itself, I feel — as I’m sure Valentine did — a sense of validation.”
“It was such a serendipitous moment when I saw Valentine’s Diamond Column. I had been wavering on the final triangular shape of my Prism Candlesticks — equilateral? isosceles? scalene? — but when I saw those columns, I knew it would be an obtuse isosceles and I would do them in gray, blue, and peach. I realized I wanted to emphasize not only all the refraction that occurs in the kind of prism that I had previously envisioned, but also how the color transmits as the form goes from thick to thin.”
“My ice bucket plays with the distortion of light, transparent color, and surface quality in order to change ever so slightly depending on how the viewer looks at it, which very much relates to Light and Space interpretations of light and perception.”
“This is a cast-glass altar I made for the Calvin Klein Collection’s Home Artisan Series, and like Valentine, I wanted it to be about the intersection of color and transparency influencing form. I wanted to achieve a gradient color field, and that informed the piece’s final shape.”
In the realm of magazine-making, photographer Eva Michon and creative director Colin Bergh could be considered populist heroes. Whenever they begin an issue of their four-year-old side project Bad Day Magazine, they make a wish list full of dozens of potential subjects they happen to be interested in at the moment — Sofia Coppola, Glenn O'Brien, Ariel Pink — and then, except for one fateful attempt to woo Nicki Minaj, they actually manage to go out and persuade those disparate personalities to appear together among their monochromatic pages. The pair have gotten so good at the curatorial hunt that when Michon, who serves as editor, agreed to let us reprint an article from the recently released Bad Day Issue #11, we were spoiled for choice: There were interviews with Sight Unseen favorites Martino Gamper and Tauba Auerbach, both of whom we're planning to feature on our own in the near future, plus stories on Mike Mills, David Shrigley, Tomi Ungerer, and David Shearer. But ultimately we settled on the curious multidisciplinary dialogue between the actor Jason Schwartzman and the New York artist Andrew Kuo, who meander between topics like music, color-mixing, hangovers, and what it would be like if they looked like Jesus.
If you're anything like us, the idea of receiving a big, overpriced bouquet on Valentine's Day seems not only a little bit schmaltzy, but also a little bit of a waste, with all the amazing design objects out there your significant other could be spending his or her money on. Isn't it more romantic or them to be so thoughtful as to gift you something you might really, actually want? With that in mind — and with a little nudge from our friends at Aether, whose strikingly minimalist Cone speaker we had on our own wish lists long before they reached out to us — we present the first ever Sight Unseen Valentine's Day gift guide, featuring 11 items guaranteed to melt the heart of any design-lover in your life.
For Heather Chontos, painting is like dreaming — a chance to work out all the things that trouble her during the day. Except that what troubles this free-spirited prop stylist and set designer is mostly just one thing: the domestic object. She once spent three years feverishly painting nothing but chairs; she made a series of drawings called "Domestic Goods Are Punishing." It's a kind of love/hate relationship. "It's endemic to stylists everywhere — you see things, you want them, you horde them all," says the 31-year-old. "It's that weighing down I really struggle with. When I first started painting, you would have never seen anything figurative, but it's all I obsess over now."
