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06.20.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Curator Instituted a Media Blackout to Help Visitors Enjoy Her Exhibition

While we here in the States debate whether or not Instagram has destroyed the design show (Spoiler alert: It hasn't), an exhibition in Barcelona recently confronted the issue head-on: For Perception, a group exhibition curated by designer Sanna Völker, no images of the exhibition were allowed to be published before or during the show, "in order for visitors to experience the installation without preconceptions and to allow them to create their own conclusions and impressions."
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06.18.18

Fair Report

A Short List of Everything We Loved At This Year’s Design Miami/Basel

Even if nothing else of interest had launched at last week's Design Miami/Basel, we would have still done this round-up if only to feature Galerie VIVID's Column Paintings by Thomas Trum, seen at the top of this post; nothing about the recent Design Academy Eindhoven's previous two-dimensional work could have prepared us for the awesomeness of these two-toned painted shelving units. Luckily, there was other good stuff at the fair to be found as well.
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06.14.18

Shopping

All Hail Block Shop’s Affordable, Art Deco–Inspired Woodblock Prints

Did you, like us, visit Block Shop's reading room at Sight Unseen OFFSITE and wish you could walk away with just a fraction of the sisters' sunny decor (including that bonkers amazing banana flower plant?) If so, consider your wish granted: This week the L.A.–based studio released its first edition of woodblock prints on colored paper, and they're a perfect, low-risk way to incorporate some of the sisters' graphic sensibility into your own home.
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06.13.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

Four Talents to Watch from Beckmans’ 2018 Graduation Show

At last year's Beckmans product-design graduation show, the Stockholm-based students were asked to create objects that went beyond their own needs. But for this year's crop of students, the overarching theme seemed to be looking inward, with projects stemming from an interrogation of their own childhoods, homes, and desires.
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06.08.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

At the Reform Design Biennale, Helping to Push Design in a More Radical Direction

Last summer, we received an invitation from Danish designer Maria Bruun to participate in the Reform Design Biennale, an open-call, juried design exhibition she co-founded in 2014 with her friends and colleagues, Louise Hagemenn, Rasmus Fox, and Jens Dan Johansen. The brief for designers? To create an experimental piece that might challenge their typical practice or usual methods of production — i.e., what the curators describe as doing "the illogical in order to create something logical." The results are on view starting tomorrow at Munkeruphus, just outside of Copenhagen.
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06.02.18

Saturday Selects

Week of May 28, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: great moments in color-blocking, an Instagram-induced existential crisis, and an iridescent shower that lifts a humdrum apartment renovation into the design stratosphere.
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05.29.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

28 Designers to Know From This Year’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE

In this year’s edition of OFFSITE Selects, the works on view were international in scope and wildly varying in scale, from a chubby-legged, rusty velvet chaise by newcomer Jessica Herrera of Oôd Studio to six tiny marble vessels by Chile’s Rodrigo Bravo (both got quickly scooped up by gallerists or other in-the-know design people).
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05.25.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Inspired by Crop Circles, Grain’s Lands Rug is Early American Settler Chic

To create their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain used to travel all the way to Guatemala, working with artisans in the country where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But over the past few years, the designers have begun sourcing producers a bit closer to home: Their Lands Rug, a custom version of which debuted at The Primary Essentials in Manhattan last week, is woven by a 30-year-old textile mill near their alma mater, RISD.
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SAIC x Sight Unseen OFFSITE
05.23.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Five Talents to Watch from SAIC’s Ceramics Exhibition at Sight Unseen OFFSITE

This year, two recently famous American designers themselves — Pete Oyler of Assembly Design and Jonah Takagi of Atelier Takagi — launched an intensive studio class in the SAIC Designed Objects program, aimed at taking students on a holistic journey from concept to exhibition, with the ultimate goal being a showcase of ceramic drinkware; the results were on view at this weekend’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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05.19.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Minimalist, Shaker-Inspired Cleaning Tools That’ll Make You Want To Do Chores

When the exhibition Furnishing Utopia debuted at Sight Unseen OFFSITE two years ago, it followed a relatively strict set of parameters: 11 international designers would spend a week at two Shaker sites in New York and Massachusetts, engaging in an intensive workshop yielding new furniture and objects directly inspired by artifacts from those sites. But this year's exhibition examines the impact of the Shakers on contemporary design in a much more conceptual way: Called Hands to Work, it features objects by more than 25 studios, each meditating on contemporary attitudes towards everyday chores.
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05.17.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

The New, Architecturally-Inspired Wallpaper You Need For Your Home

Today marks the launch of Ratio, Twyla’s first-ever, limited-edition line of luxury wallpaper, with the first four patterns curated by Sight Unseen. Aiming to highlight Twyla’s ability to capture minute texture and detail, we asked four of our favorite architectural photographers to lend us a single image, and then invited four artists to create paintings loosely inspired by their use of shadow, color, line, or shape.
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