New Textiles by Alyson Fox for Ferm Living

When we profiled the designer and artist Alyson Fox last year, on a visit to the home she and her husband built themselves in the wilds of Texas, we spent much of the story marveling at the sheer, unrelenting range and volume of her creative output. Which is to say: We could theoretically be writing about some new project of hers every week if we wanted to — she's just that prolific. We won't go there, of course, yet when of-the-moment Danish housewares brand Ferm Living offered to let us be the first to share the new line it's done in collaboration with Fox, in advance of revealing its full 2015 collection to the world tomorrow, we figured it was as good a time as any to check in with the talent.
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The Best of 2014

It's been a big year for Sight Unseen, from the launch of our OFFSITE show to the expansion of our staff to celebrating our 5th anniversary, not to mention having recently started the process of redesigning our website for the very first time. But the more exciting and action-packed things get, the faster time seems to speed by — it's nice to take a moment to pause and reflect. With the holidays upon us, we decided to put together a simple best-of list that highlights some of our most popular content from 2014, including the five stories that got the most traffic on Sight Unseen, the five (er six, counting the one above) images that got the most likes on Instagram, and our five most-repinned photos on Pinterest.
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Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo of Amateurs

For all its perks — freedom, travel, never having to take off your pajamas — the freelance life has one perpetual drawback: the panic that starts to creep in whenever you're between jobs. Add that to the sense of creative fulfillment that every designer and artist craves, and it's no wonder so many of them start their own projects on the side. For the Paris-based couple Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo, whenever they don't have work as a freelance illustrator (Julien) and a film and animation director (Angdoo), they dream up new projects to release under the extra-wide umbrella of their shared endeavor, Amateurs; launched in June, the website comprises projects that are experimental, hand-crafted, and fall somewhere between art and design, like painted tea towels and flags, embroidered sweaters and blankets, plus actual paintings as well. We checked in with the duo to find out more about the collaboration.
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Week of December 15, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: new jewelry based on Superstudio sketches from the '70s, a new BDDW housewares line based in the middle of nowhere, and a tropical photoshoot by Studiopepe that basically makes us want to jump on a plane immediately and fly south.
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Tanya Aguiñiga and Meg Callahan on Cotton

Nearly a year ago, when we first conceived the notion of arranging interviews between two creatives working with the same material, the idea was to make things interesting by choosing people with very different practices — a designer using resin to make furniture, for example, conversing with an artist using it to make paintings. That’s exactly what we thought we’d done when we invited Meg Callahan, an Oklahoman quilt-maker living in Rhode Island, to talk cotton with Tanya Aguiñiga, a furniture and accessories designer raised in Mexico and based in Los Angeles, and yet it turned out the pair had much more in common than we’d realized: both studied furniture at RISD, both create contemporary work with traditional influences, and — with Callahan about to, it turns out, launch a furniture collection — both have an interest in blurring the boundaries between hard and soft. Which was fitting, in a way, since this story was inspired by a new series of films produced by Cotton that explore the common threads in the daily lives of two seemingly disparate people.
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Week of December 8, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: three new jewelry lines we're coveting, our top must-have from the shop at the newly reopened Cooper Hewitt museum (above), and are speckles the new squiggles? You be the judge.
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Visit Us This Weekend at Tinseltown, With Refinery29

Last week we shared with you our official Sight Unseen holiday gift guides, which were full of links to our most-coveted design and fashion items this year. But for those of you who prefer to browse in person — and will be in New York this weekend — we're taking our wish lists IRL at Tinseltown, Refinery 29's annual holiday shopping event, which we're co-hosting this year. Sight Unseen has invited seven amazing vendors to offer their wares for sale: Alex Proba, Best Made Company, Bower, CHIAOZZA, Dusen Dusen, Fredericks & Mae, and MAKE Cosmetics. Refinery29 are hosting RillRill and Print All Over Me, plus a cat-themed boutique and a hairstyling bar. Best of all, CHIAOZZA's Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza will be on hand all weekend offering personalized papier-mâché plants, so you can choose custom colors and patterns and get them painted for you on the spot! It's all happening at OpenHouse in Nolita, 201 Mulberry Street, on December 13 and 14, from 12PM to 8PM each day.
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At Art Basel and Design Miami 2014

Glancing out the window on this cold, grey, rainy day in New York City, it's hard to believe that just last week we were frolicking in the sunshine in Miami, immersing ourselves in art and design and running into friends like Su Wu and Brent Dzekciorius on the street while flitting between parties and champagne brunches. While the primary purpose of our time there was to launch a new collaboration with Print All Over Me for the shop at the Standard (read all about that here), we managed to squeeze a million other activities into our four-day trip, from a visit to the impeccably curated Untitled art fair to a bizarre slide lecture and fashion show by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to a 3AM performance by rapper Rae Sremmurd at a local nightclub that left our ears ringing for three days straight. While you won't find that particular dalliance documented here, we did take plenty of photographs of art and design; some of our favorites are posted after the jump.
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SU x PAOM for The Standard Shop

Last week in Miami, you could go home with art in just about any form — not just on a canvas (Art Basel) but in the form of a vase or a table (Design Miami), a pool toy (Grey Area x FriendsWithYou), a champagne bottle (Ruinart x Georgia Russel), or, if you happened by the shop at The Standard Spa, beach gear courtesy of yours truly. For this year's Miami fair, Sight Unseen teamed up with Print All Over Me to curate a line of warm-weather clothing and accessories sold exclusively at the Standard, featuring prints by Paul Wackers, Ellen Van Dusen of Dusen Dusen, Peter Judson, Rachel Domm, Caitlin Foster, Marta Veludo, Eunice Luk, Branden Collins, and Rafael de Cardenas (who designed the shop's interior a few years back).
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75 Gifts We’re Coveting — Monica

If you’re anything like us, you probably spent this weekend thinking less about buying new things and more about giving thanks for what you already have. But let’s be real: Gifting season is about to get seriously underway, and with that in mind we've put together a fantasy wish list of all the beautiful, considered design objects we've been eyeing lately. Welcome to Sight Unseen's second annual gift guide, in which each member of the Sight Unseen team — Monica on Monday, Jill on Tuesday, and Ryland, our assistant editor, on Wednesday — will share the 25 items they're coveting at the moment, from the attainable ($10 chocolate bars) to the wildly aspirational ($10,000 chairs). Happy holidays!
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Color Palette, From PIN–UP #17

When PIN–UP editor Felix Burrichter asked me to put together a product-driven color story for the magazine's new fall issue, which just came out last week, I said yes without hesitation — then secretly panicked later. It turns out that defining yourself by a single hue can be strangely intimidating. After thinking about it for ages, I resolved not to think at all, resorting to an idea that's been kicking around Sight Unseen's Pinterest feed for months now: electric blue, reimagined for the magazine as the more whimsical-sounding "peacock." I rounded up 14 of our favorite examples, which PIN–UP contributor Fausto Fantinuoli turned into the gorgeous illustration pictured above, along with the selections of Ambra Medda (dolphin), Tauba Auerbach (vermillion), and Paloma Powers (blush). Burrichter was kind enough to let us share the full story, which you can view after the jump.
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Ann Veronica Janssens, Artist

Lately it feels like whenever we've seen a piece at an art fair that we love, it's turned out to be the work of one of a very small group of our favorite artists (Alicja Kwade, Thea Djordjaze, Jonas Wood, David Korty, etc) whose work seems to pops up again and again in such contexts. One of the most frequent is Ann Veronica Janssens, a British-born, Brussels-based artist whose practice is based around finding ways to visualize light and other ephemeral forces while balancing them against the more tangible qualities of architecture. Janssens has been around for awhile — she represented Britain at the 1999 Venice Biennale — but we're particularly fond of her most recent body of work, which is more object-based than light-based. See a selection of it after the jump.
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