Comprising four days, 12,000 square feet, and 50-something exhibitors, Sight Unseen OFFSITE is a major undertaking — a Herculean one, in fact, if you consider that there are only two of us leading the entire operation. So when we announced in April that we were doing an additional show this year, at the Collective Design fair, people quite understandably looked at us like we’d lost our minds. And yet we persisted on the sheer force of our belief that Steven Learner and his team at Collective are doing great things for design, things we wanted to be a part of — not just providing a platform for some of the world’s most important design galleries to sell to clients, but attempting to widen the dialogue with special projects like (this year) on-site design performances by The American Design Club, a Nap Lab by Various Projects and Print All Over Me, installations by OS & OOS and Jonathan Nesci, and of course, an offer to let us curate a corollary to Sight Unseen OFFSITE that featured six up-and-coming American designers making gallery-level work. If you didn’t get the chance to see last week’s Collective Design fair, which welcomed more than 10,000 visitors, here’s our best of show — and stay tuned for images from our own presentation at Collective, which we’ll be posting tomorrow.
Jonathan Nesci hung three dozen mirrors on the wall for his Present Perimeter project, which explored “a compositional framework that combines equal numbers of hexagons, half-hexagons, rhombuses, and triangles.”
New vases by Thaddeus Wolfe at R & Company’s booth
New vases by Thaddeus Wolfe at R & Company’s booth
Jonah Takagi’s site-specific “Colosseum” installation for Artsy, which was a huge stair-stepped seating arc covered in multi-colored industrial foam.
Cody Hoyt covered a table in new ceramic vessels for Patrick Parrish.
Hoyt works in more mediums than just ceramics, though — he lined Parrish’s booth with his drawings and paintings.
One of our favorite items in the show was this new coffee table by Ghiora Aharoni in Donzella’s booth, made from heavy gauge steel and safety glass.
Also in Donzella’s booth, vases by Sottsass.
Sottsass vase in Donzella’s booth
An “Eye Lamp” from 1968 designed by Nicola L.
Nearby, in Galerie Negropontes’s booth, a new eye mirror by Hervé Langlais.
An unidentified sculpture from Galerie Negropontes.
Etages Projects had half its booth stuck in customs, but what remained — a series of sculptures by FOS — was still impressive.
Huge hand sculptures by Wolfs + Jung at Ammann Gallery’s booth.
A side table by Panoramica at Ammann Gallery.
New tables by Misha Kahn at Friedman Benda’s booth.
Kahn also made a series of lamps in Africa that debuted with Friedman Benda.
Misha Kahn at Friedman Benda
A 1960 tapestry by Le Corbusier presented by Bruun Rasmussen.
A lamp at Nicholas Kilner’s booth.
Memphis Post Design Gallery installed confetti carpeting and had pieces like this Shiro Kurimata table on view.
An amazing trio of granite and silver candlesticks from 1987 by Kristian Nilsson.
Collective invited Various Projects and Print All Over Me to do an installation on an upper mezzanine, and the result was the Nap Lab, a cushion-filled chill zone with work by Katie Stout and Dome Collective.
Kinder Modern debuted new kids furniture by Material Lust.
Previous pieces by AQQ Design for Kinder Modern.
A new chaise by Grégoire de Lafforest and a small bit of OS & OOS’s Mono-Light on view at Galerie Gosserez.
New tabletop sculptures by Kneip at Fuglen’s booth.
One of several pretty sculptures by Arne Lindaas at Fuglen.
A mask by Arne Lindaas at Fuglen.
After our phenomenally successful, inaugural Sight Unseen OFFSITE event last year — which included an Instagram-ready still-life photo booth, a Memphis-y soup of Print All Over Me goodness, and a cocktail party with a line around the block — the question on everyone's lips was: But will you do it again? Today, we're happy to announce that yes, Sight Unseen OFFSITE will be returning for a second, even more exciting year!
A little more than a week ago, we were eyeball-deep in preparations for our Sight Unseen OFFSITE show, which runs for two more days in New York City. We had insurance permits to apply for, electricity installations to oversee, and staffers to train, but we were still determined to drag ourselves away long enough to see two of our favorite shows of the year: the Collective Design Fair, and Frieze New York. And oh, was it worth it — Collective had nearly doubled in size since its first edition last year, and Frieze once again gathered some of the most gorgeous art we'd seen in ages under one roof (not to mention with killer food by the likes of Roberta's and the Fat Radish). See a small selection of our highlights after the jump, then head over to our Facebook page to see much, much more.
Tom Dixon, Bram Boo, e15, and Thomas Eyck all showed products in copper at the 2010 Milan Furniture Fair, which closes today. There was also a minor strain of fur-covered chairs — plus one hairy, Cousin-It-style storage unit by the Campana Brothers for Edra — and a tendency toward LED and OLED lighting. But as far as Sight Unseen is concerned, the only trend worth writing home about was the diaristic glimpse into process that so many designers chose to offer this year, supplementing their finished products with sketches, models, and real-time demonstrations.