12.21.12

The Making of

Archivo Diario by Melinda Santillan and Marco Rountree Cruz

If you're the kind of person who pays attention to Pinterest, you may have spotted the playful image above making the rounds there as of late. But we can pretty much guarantee you don't know the story of the two Mexican artists who created it — and the blog it's pulled from, Archivo Diario — which turns out to be one of the more amusing tales we've heard in awhile. We were lucky enough to meet Marco Rountree Cruz and Melinda Santillan at a party thrown this fall by Jennilee Marigomen of 01 Magazine, and we decided to keep in touch with the Mexico City–based couple, who launched Archivo Diario three months ago both as a way to force themselves to create something new every day and to try their hand at working together (Cruz being a successful installation artist and Santillan more of an art director). But when we dug a little deeper, we found out that the endeavor was technically their second collaboration, and was in many ways a direct reaction to the failure of first: an elaborate script for a stylized telenovela that they dreamed of actually producing, but that has since languished in their desk drawer. We were so impressed by the couple's boundless creative ambitions — just wait until you hear about the crazy project Cruz is working on now — that we begged them to tell us everything

12.20.12

Up and Coming

Fabien Cappello, Furniture Designer

Whatever Fabien Cappello's studies at ECAL may have taught him about luxury, his subsequent grad degree at the RCA may have un-taught him: The London-based designer has made stools carved from trashed Christmas trees, Venetian glass vessels melted onto lowly bricks, and benches constructed from shipping pallets or punctuated with cheap street-vendors' umbrellas. That's not to say, of course, that Cappello's work isn't high end — it's been shown at the likes of Libby Sellers Gallery and has won him an Elle Decoration New Designers Award — just that the materials and ideas he sees value in wouldn't exactly be considered the norm. If he's come a long way since setting up his own studio in 2009, it's because his focus on local and overlooked resources has captured the curiosity of the design world, not just its eyes or its wallets. That said, with the world headed where it's headed, his style of economical chic may become the new luxury before long, so we figured he was worth checking in with. He gave Sight Unseen a quick glimpse into his practice below.

12.14.12

Q+A

Morgan Peck at Totokaelo

When Jill Wenger opened the first incarnation of the Seattle store Totokaelo in 2003, she had a few goals: showcasing the work of local designers, improving choices for all-weather gear. But as she grew to be the most fashion-forward resource in the city, she took on the more important mandate of helping to raise Seattle’s style profile in general, banishing annoying sartorial habits like square-toed shoes, embroidery, and pleather handbags. While there’s still work to be done in that arena, this year — with the opening of her massive new store and its “Art—Object” component — Wenger expanded her tastemaking activities beyond the body and into the home. Her stable contains more than a few of our favorite players, from Philip Low to Seattle’s hometown heroes Iacoli & McAllister, but months ago, it was Morgan Peck who really caught our eye. Not only was the ceramicist suddenly showing up on shelves at Iko Iko and Mociun, among others, there was almost no information about her on the web. And so we invited Wenger to take a stab at interviewing the Los Angeles–based talent for our Peer Review column.

12.12.12

What They Bought

Table of Contents, Portland

Table of Contents is a concept shop that sells clothing and objects from a storefront just inside the gates of Portland’s Chinatown, opened in September by two local designers. So when one of them, Joseph Magliaro, told us that “the goal of TOC is to produce an expanded notion of what a publication can be,” well, you can’t blame us if we were a smidge confused. But it turns out that Magliaro and his other half, Shu Hung, prefer to look at their store as a kind of magazine come to life — a place where the things we’re all reading about now, or should be, are actually there to have and to hold, and where every fashion season brings a new “editorial” theme.

12.04.12

Up and Coming

Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, Furniture and Product Designers

After Jean Lee met Dylan Davis while studying industrial design at the University of Washington, and after a string of successful school collaborations led them to start dating, the two of them did a semester abroad together in Rome. “Those were the good times,” laughs Lee. “We saw all these independent studios there, and designers working more as artists, and it was really inspiring for us. That wasn't happening at all in Seattle.” And so after they graduated in 2005, Lee went on to work for a messenger bag company based in Philadelphia, while Davis joined the team at Henrybuilt. They did a small trade selling vintage finds on Etsy for awhile, and eventually started repurposing those objects into new designs as a hobby. But what finally led them to join forces as Ladies & Gentlemen in 2009 were the first signs that they might be able to find in Seattle what they experienced in Rome after all: Not only had studios like Iacoli & Mcallister and Grain begun to flourish by making and selling their own work, their new coalition Join was gathering together local designers to collaborate and exhibit together. “Jamie Iacoli asked us to contribute to a show, and were like ‘What the hell? Let’s do it!’”

11.29.12

The Making of

Malin Gabriella Nordin’s Children’s Workshop

Malin Gabriela Nordin isn’t the type who’d be quick to align herself with an art movement — the 24-year-old prefers to stay as insulated as possible from outside influences, which is why she left her friends and family in Stockholm four years ago to attend art school in comparably tiny Bergen, Norway. But as it turns out, Nordin is something of a Surrealist, at least from where we’re standing: Everything about her process is geared towards connecting with her subconscious, from letting her sculptures develop intuitively and spontaneously to painting with quick-dry acrylics, eliminating any lag between her mind and the canvas. And then there’s her obsession with children. “My work has to do with reconstructing fragments from memories, and I've been working with my own childhood a lot,” she says. “I think of kids at that age as more free.” It’s that notion that led Dalí and Picasso to pay homage to the creativity of the pint-sized, and that led Nordin to make them the subject of her senior graduation project, inviting eleven children to participate in her artistic process.

11.23.12

Fair Report

At London’s Frieze Art Fair

Which furniture designs do discerning art dealers truly prefer? Not to sell, but to sit in? That was the age-old question that photographer Sanna Helena Berger set out to answer while traversing the aisles of last month's Frieze Art Fair. Her utterly unscientific answer? Four out of five discerning art dealers prefer Friso Kramer, or failing that, some variation on mid-century bentwood. Quelle surprise. A Swedish photographer based in London, Berger chose to hone in on the subject after her maiden voyage to Frieze — tagging along with a friend's art class — proved otherwise underwhelming. “The space itself is divided into cubicles, very much like an overcrowded office, except that everything is crisp, bright, and white and within the cubicles the office wear is of a higher standard,” she explains. “Obviously I don’t claim that there was no worthwhile art there, because there certainly was, but the environment, the space, and the curation were not for me.” Instead of complaining, though, and jeopardizing her friend’s happy experience, Berger pulled out her camera and devoted the rest of the day to documenting art-booth furniture. Then she decided to share the results with usThen she decided to share the results with us, in a behind-the-scenes exposé that will no doubt put a lot of curious minds at ease, once and for all.

11.19.12

Studio Visit

Renee So, Artist

London artist Renee So found the inspiration for her current body of work in the hallowed halls of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she'd stumbled upon a collection of so-called German Bellarmine jugs — stoneware vessels that 16th- and 17th-century artisans carved to look like portly bearded woodsmen, purposefully firing them full of cracks so they'd resemble archaeological relics. The bulbous ceramic busts that So has been sculpting in their likeness for the last five years carry a similar chronological dissonance, conjuring not just Germanic folk art but Greco-Roman sculpture, traditional playing cards, mid-century pottery, and contemporary illustration. In her drawings, relief prints, and weavings, which she makes by hand on a knitting machine, these enigmatic characters grow limbs and promenade down the street. "My desire to knit pictures was inspired by the beautiful tapestries I would see in historic houses and museums in Europe," So says. Just about the time that we were turned onto her work by a London curator friend, we realized that Sight Unseen contributor Paul Barbera had shot her studio for his blog Where They Create, and we couldn't resist featuring his images here, alongside a short interview with the multi-talented artist herself.

11.16.12

Q+A

Caroline Achaintre on Arcademi

The biggest reason why we love our new Peer Review column: because it lets us heap mountains of credit onto blogs like Arcademi — the source of more of our "holy shit" moments than almost any other site — while giving us good reason to borrow their content. Namely, the opportunity to hear their subjects wax poetic about things like hairy tufting and multiple personalities, like today's subject, Caroline Achaintre. We were lucky enough to convince Arcademi editor Moritz Firchow to interview the London-based artist, who trained as a blacksmith before finding her way to a multidisciplinary practice inspired by the way German expressionism, post-war British sculpture, and Primitivism merge influences from both ancient and modern culture.

11.12.12

Fair Report

At the 2012 Dutch Design Week

It's been a tough two years for Dutch design. First a newly elected right-wing government slashed the tiny country's legendary arts funding, causing seemingly irreparable damage to its institutions and grant programs, and then a series of high-profile resignations called into question the inner workings of Eindhoven's hallowed Design Academy. But even if there are signs that the fairy-tale may not last — that creativity and experimentalism can't elude the death-grip of capitalism forever, even in a place where designers still benefit from squatters' rights — we still look forward to Dutch Design Week as a reminder of the happier consequences of those values. While we couldn't attend this year ourselves, we asked our faithful contributor Marco Tabasso, who's second-in-command at Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan, to report back on his experiences at the festival — from his mixed feelings about the Design Academy show to the paella dinner he and Rossana shared with Nacho Carbonell in the designer's studio, above.

11.07.12

Sighted

Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms at the Guggenheim

It may look like a staging area for the production of Stuart Haygarth chandeliers or Massimiliano Adami cabinets, or possibly an excerpt from the website Things Organized Neatly. But the comely technicolor garbage pile pictured above is actually a piece by the Mexican art-star Gabriel Orozco, who's known for his use of humble materials and found objects, and it's moving into New York's Guggenheim museum as of this Friday. Asterisms is a process-oriented installation — our favorite kind! — featuring thousands of objects Orozco collected from two separate sites: a sports field near his New York home and a wildlife reserve on the coast of Baja California Sur, the latter of which happens to enjoy a constant flow of industrial backwash from across the Pacific that every so often yields bits of aesthetically pleasing detritus.

11.05.12

Excerpt: Exhibition

Reflections on Form at Helmrinderknecht

Last week, while we were muddling through a natural disaster that sent one of us to live in a hotel for two weeks (destroying a four-year archive of I.D. magazines in the process) and the other one out to Queens to try to help other storm victims who are still in the dark, we found a small and welcome ray of sunshine in our inboxes. The "Reflections on Form" exhibition that opened at Europe's roving Helmrinderknecht gallery on Friday is a kind of coincidental corollary to the Moss auction at Phillips we featured two weeks ago: Both exhibits make simple, formal comparisons between great works of design and great works of art, with the only difference we can see being Helmrinderknecht's skew towards younger, newer talents.