For the second year in a row, Sight Unseen is proud to be presenting at Collective Design, which opened to the public yesterday and runs through Sunday afternoon. We’re smack in the middle of the fair this year, spotlighting new work by five American design studios on the rise: Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Only Love Is Real, and Fort Makers. At the VIP opening on Tuesday night, we heard comments like “It’s like Sight Unseen come to life!” “It’s amazing how every booth is so different but everything goes together perfectly!” and, straight from Julianne Moore’s mouth, “This is gorgeous.” We couldn’t agree more — our designers seriously knocked it out of the park on this one. And you can’t miss us: In addition to their furniture presentations, each studio is debuting a colorful, custom wallcovering they’ve developed with Designtex especially for this show. If you’re not in New York, we’ve published a sneak peek at our booth below. If you are in town, by all means, please come visit! We’re in Booth #B15, we have amazing fellow exhibitors, and the show runs through Sunday at 5PM. Hope to see you there!

Bower x Studio Proba

For Collective Design, Studio Proba and Bower joined forces to create Zendo. Exploring forms, materials, textures, and colors that have interested them over the past year, the two studios are debuting a collection that immerses the viewer in a tranquil, multi-sensory experience. Employing themes of water, reflection, and transcendence, they invite visitors to lie on their Nirvana rug, sit on their Waterline chair, gaze into their multicolored Water mirrors, all the while listening to the trickle of their Pivot fountain. The meditative vibe of this collection evolved from the designers’ collective subconscious, in an attempt to slow down and balance out their otherwise hectic lives.

Only Love Is Real

The body of work being shown at Collective began last summer when OLIR founder Matthew Morgan made a connection between the geometric structures of Sol LeWitt and Milo Baughman’s 1980s-era étagères: In his mind, LeWitt’s pure conceptualism had a relationship with the glam, decorative, barely functional, instantly out-of-fashion Baughman shelving units. In addition to directly referencing both designers as he created this collection of furniture in response, he added strict parameters to the way the pieces were made — for example, making every dimension and angle divisible by three, exploring the harmony and logic that come from consistency and structure.

Chris Wolston

In his exploration of materiality across cultures, Brooklyn- and Medellin-based designer Chris Wolston combines traditional modes of making — left over from a time when small-scale manufacturing was the norm — with the high-tech materials of modern mass production. Aluminum sand-casting is one of Colombia’s most common production methods, applied to everyday domestic objects like pans and kitchen tools. For Collective, Wolston has applied the technique to the aluminum foam sheeting normally found in architectural sound-proofing, which is typically incredibly complex to manufacture, using this discordance of material practices to create a collection of sculptural tables, lighting, and seating.

Fort Makers

Fort Makers is debuting a group of usable sculptures that expand upon the collective’s shared language, which has evolved from an ongoing conversation about color, material, organic form, and linear form. Exuberantly painted colored shapes make up a large-scale wallpaper mural, setting the stage. The mural’s shapes play off two large pieces of sculptural maple furniture: an executive desk with an oblong glass top and a modular shelving unit, both marked by linear and organic wooden supports. In addition, hand-painted canvas in the same colors as the mural has been fashioned into stuffed rectangular and square seating units. The effect is as if the shapes of the mural had fallen off the wall and into three dimensions.