02.20.15

Sight Unseen Presents

Visit Us This Weekend at Capsule!

Looking for some visual inspiration this weekend? If you're a buyer, a distributor, or a member of the press, head on over to Capsule New York's new home at Pier 94, where Sight Unseen is happy to be participating this year! After years of simply attending the fashion trade show to peep new collections from friends like Ilana Kohn or Ellen van Dusen — and to scout talents from the extremely well-curated mix — we've finally partnered with the newly combined ready-to-wear and accessories show, where we'll be curating a small section of home and accessories brands. There will be ceramic French presses and copper lights from Yield Design, block-printed throws and pretty things by Caroline Z. Hurley, a new line of lower-priced mugs from Ian Anderson of Aandersson Design, geometric jewelry and tabletop goods by Sarah Loertscher, colorful candlesticks and mirrors by Good Thing, and so much more (which we're giving you a sneak peek of below). It’s all happening at Pier 94, 711 12th Ave, from Sunday, February 22–Tuesday, February 24 14, starting at 9:30AM each day. Hope to see you there!

02.18.15

From the Library Of

Esprit’s Brand Books

There are some books that are quoted, referenced, or photographed so often in our line of work that they begin to feel like touchstones for design-world enthusiasts all over the world. The Nathalie du Pasquier–illustrated Leonard Koren bible Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement is of those such books; the late-'90s graphic-design manifesto Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist is another. But recently, another book has begun popping up no matter where we look. Esprit: The Comprehensive Design Principle — a huge, softcover paean to every design aspect of the beloved 1980s fashion brand — was published in 1989 by its founder Douglas Tompkins, but has experienced a resurgence of late in these '80s nostalgia–tinged, Memphis revival–happy times.

02.14.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 9, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, the humble accent table takes on many forms: an iridescent I-beam, a rug-wrapped hexagon, and a charred-wood square with a hairy interior void.

02.12.15

Sighted

Huy Bui on Freunde Von Freunden

Though we have a particular fondness for so many of the designers we've featured or worked with in the five years since Sight Unseen began, Huy Bui might be the only one who can lay claim to being both one of our favorite designers and the co-founder of one of our favorite New York restaurants. As the founder of Plant-In City — or what he calls architectural terrariums for "the 21st century" — Bui was one of the inaugural exhibitors at our Sight Unseen OFFSITE showcase last year. And as the designer and co-founder of the Lower East Side Vietnamese eatery An Choi, Bui's provided the backdrop for many a late-night design date. So when Freunde von Freunden reached out with the opportunity to co-publish a story on Bui's Brooklyn apartment and studio — complete with cameos by the designer's sweet dog Loopy, one of the more popular attractions at OFFSITE last year — we jumped at the chance.

02.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Doty/Glasco at CES Gallery

We had never heard of the photography husband-and-wife team of JR Doty and Joe Glasco — or the LA gallery CES — before this exhibition announcement arrived in our inbox today, but as soon as we saw the photos we were hooked. The two photographers began collaborating professionally back in 2013, and their current work draws from an archive of more than 40,000 images that were taken on a road trip across America over the last year. Doty and Glasco photographed specific locations, like Utah and California, because of their unique geological conditions. "The images represent the essence of nature with an emphasis on the phenomena of time as it affects the landscape’s topography, such as rippling water, striations of marble and the constant changing of landforms," the press release reads.

02.04.15

Up and Coming

Ferris McGuinty, Artist

If you go looking on the internet for information about a Cornwall-based maker named Ferris McGuinty, chances are you won't find much. Yes, McGuinty is on the younger side (we were born in the same year, so at least that's what I'm telling myself) but even more than that: Ferris McGuinty didn't exist until 2009. The name was merely a pseudonym the artist took on to allow himself the freedom to make work that was unlike anything he'd done before. Having graduated from art school in the early 2000s, McGuinty previously made work that was smaller in scale, tiny, almost architectural-like models. As a respite from that, he began gathering found objects — "I'm quite a prolific hoarder," he says proudly — and marrying them with elements of his own creation to make the kind of assemblage objects you see at the top of this post. "Ferris came about because because the work really had that day-off vibe. McGuinty somehow naturally followed suit. But it allowed me a sense of detachment from my own work. I could be much more playful and not worried about what direction it went in."

01.31.15

Saturday Selects

Week of January 26, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sorting the best of the rest from January's design fairs, getting a crash course in great product photography, and hailing the almighty power of pink (not to mention colored gradients, as seen in Bryce Wilner's puzzle — yes that's a puzzle — above).

01.26.15

Travel

Glass Villages, Ceramics Factories, and Split-Pea Soup: Our Week in Finland

If you’re a longtime reader of this site, you know that we are, above all, sunshine-seeking people who happen to be inextricably linked to New York and its fickle seasons. Normally we leap at the chance to hightail it off the East Coast anytime between November and April, in search of beaches, pools, palm trees, and vitamin D. But somehow, while Monica and the rest of the design world headed to Miami at the beginning of December, I found myself saying yes to a week in Finland, home of 30-degree temperatures and 3PM sunsets. When I arrived, no fewer than three people delighted in telling me that the previous month in Finland had seen only 15 hours of sunshine.

01.21.15

Up and Coming

Daniel Everett, Photographer

Utah-based artist Daniel Everett has a BFA in photography from Brigham Young and a master’s from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But it may have been what happened between his two degrees that had the biggest impact on Everett’s career. “I’d done an internship as part of my undergraduate degree with Edward Burtynsky, and after I finished my undergrad, I traveled with him for just over a year,” Everett remembers. “If you know his work, Burtynsky photographs, like, manmade manipulations of the landscape: the largest open-pit copper mine, or the largest oil field. We were always traveling to some superlative location — the biggest, the widest, the greatest — and I got really interested in the in-between places that we passed through: the nondescript, transitory spaces like subway systems, airports, parking garages, and hotels. Spaces that are meant to be legible regardless of the language, and where the aesthetics are governed by function.”

01.17.15

Saturday Selects

Week of January 12, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about material experiments: ping-pong paddles in Plexi or wood, a yoga-ball holder built from inflated concrete and pigment, and furniture made from the remnants of an imaginary construction site.

01.16.15

From the Library Of

Lisa Mayock: Welcome to Big Biba

If there's anyone we would trust to guide us through the annals of vintage fashion literature, it's Lisa Mayock, co-founder of the sadly defunct, cool-girl label Vena Cava and now a Brooklyn-based creative consultant. So we were pretty thrilled when we sent out a call for this column a few months back and Mayock immediately responded with one of her most beloved and referenced books, BIG BIBA: Inside the Most Beautiful Store in the World. The book traces the short life of the 7-story Big Biba department store, which opened in 1973 after the fashion label's massive success as first a mail-order catalog and then a series of London boutiques.

01.14.15

Sighted

Ron Nagle, Ceramicist

One of the best things about ceramics' recent ascent in the art world is that a brighter light has been shone on designers who were practicing in the medium long before "urban claymaking" was ever a thing. The latest artist to experience a massive upswing in attention is Ron Nagle, the San Francisco–based postwar ceramicist who, in his 70s, still adds to his already massive body of work at an amazing clip. Shown at the last art Biennale in Venice, Nagle is currently the subject of both an exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art and a lovely feature in the new issue of PIN-UP Magazine, who writes of Nagle's process: "Each [piece] boasts the presence of a monument covered in variations of fine stucco textures sprayed with layers of pastel, blush fields often overtaken by thick glazed pools and electric pinstripes. The pieces begin as collections of hand sculpted elements, and are slip cast, carved and fitted to each other, gaining their deep beds of color from multiple firings that are finished with chinapaint. The forms have shifted in theme through his career: from lean green tendrils hailing from ikebana to diorama scenes housing pulsing red cubes." We're particularly fond of a recurring trope in Nagle's work that resembles glassy spears of asparagus, so we've rounded up a few of our favorite examples here.