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04.09.22

Saturday Selects

Week of April 4, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, dinner party hosting as an extreme sport, exquisite new vessels by Shio Kusaka, and an excellent new exhibition exclusively focused on female and nonbinary woodworkers. 
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12.02.21

Interiors

A Chat with Erwan Bouroullec About Textiles, Layering, and His Studio’s Newest Showroom for Kvadrat

French designers Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec have such a long and creatively productive history with the celebrated textile producer Kvadrat that they’ve become something like family. So when the Danish company decided it wanted to establish a foothold in Los Angeles this fall, the Bouroullecs came up with a concept that’s a little less like a showroom and a little more like a home — literally. We spoke to Erwan about the project, as well as about how textiles change the way people behave, which design elements make a home, the importance of layering, and the power of stairs.
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Nick Pourfard furniture
10.26.21

Up and Coming

Nick Pourfard, the Guitar-Maker Turned Furniture Designer On the Rise

Skateboarding gave Nick Pourfard his foundation in design. Building ramps and obstacles for his friends provided an early education in how to put materials together effectively, and old skateboard decks are what he’s used to construct the body of the guitars he’s been producing since 2014. Recently, this San Diego–based luthier (maker of stringed instruments) has moved into furnishings, bringing his meticulous skills and try-it-and-see approach with him.
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09.01.21

What They Bought

The Vintage Furniture Dealer Whose Aesthetic Runs From Bauhaus to Beetlejuice

Gennaro Leone, who runs the vintage furniture shop Spazio Leone in London, is clearly devoted to the cult of '70s and '80s Italian design. But he’s also drawn to pieces that seem to exist in a dream-zone where Art Deco–meets-Postmodernism and Surrealist motifs, along with a hint of Delia Deetz (that's Catherine O’Hara’s sculptor stepmom in Beetlejuice, for anyone who needs a refresher). In the short time that Leone's been up and running, the dealer has developed an aesthetic that could even be described — as he himself puts it — as “WTF is this? I’m trying to find a balance between crazy shapes and comfortable things.
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11.24.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Group Exhibition in Detroit Celebrates the Design Scene of a City That Was ‘Never Normal’

Never Normal — a timely group exhibition by the Detroit gallery Wasserman Projects, in collaboration with the local collective Form&Seek — examines how, post-pandemic, our relationships with our domestic spaces are transforming in ways we might not even be able to fully understand yet. But it also celebrates a city that in many ways has long considered itself an outlier.
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10.08.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

Duro Olowu’s Mind-Expanding Chicago Exhibition Crosses Time, Place, Gender, and Race

Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, the highly anticipated exhibition curated by the Nigerian-born British designer, was up for only two weeks at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago before the pandemic shutdown of last March. But when the MCA re-opened, it thankfully extended the show's run into early fall. Walking through the rooms — teeming with over 300 works Olowu selected from the city’s public and private art collections — was a bit like scrolling through a really engaging, unpredictable Instagram account, but without the glazed exhaustion and listlessness that comes from being so online. Or the frustration of being on the outside looking in. This was a show that welcomed you.
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Seer Studio Offsite Online
06.09.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Seer Studio is Making Your Dream Sofa Down in Austin, Texas

The pieces that Scott Martin designs, as Seer Studio, lean towards the dramatic. As with any good drama, there's a conflict that creates a compelling tension — in this case, between a kind of sophisticated glamour and an uncomplicated, comfortable ease, between big, comfy curves and sharp, stark angles, and a way of working with proportion and scale to create furniture that somehow feels both worldly and intimate.
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08.30.18

Q+A

The Mesmerizing Color-Field Paintings — Both Digital and Canvas — of Artist Ana Montiel

Questions about the nature of perception ­— the what, why, and how of consciousness ­— have been driving the work of Mexico-based artist Ana Montiel lately. And while any definitive answers to such age-old puzzles remain elusive, Montiel's work provides a kind of aesthetic response, making those mysteries both visual and material. There’s a mesmeric, meditative quality to her canvas and digitally-created color field paintings, reminiscent of the Light & Space art of the '60s and '70s.
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Block Shop Los Angeles studio
05.10.18

Studio Visit

Inside the Color-Drenched L.A. Studio of Block Shop Textiles

For their installation at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, sisters Lily and Hopie Stockman — the duo behind the textile line Block Shop — are drawing inspiration from their own studio, high up in a historic bank building in downtown Los Angeles. “Our studio is filled with rugs and pillows and dogs and books and other human beings coming and going. We wanted to recreate that in New York,” says Hopie. Voracious, eclectic readers, the Stockman sisters have envisioned the project as a reading room.
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