07.31.12

The Making of

Office by Studio Swine

Things are winding down here at Sight Unseen HQ, where as of tomorrow we'll be on a much-needed summer holiday for two weeks. So today, we bring you an appropriately tiny story about a very tiny project: an office by Studio Swine in London's Soho neighborhood where three people share a 100 square-foot space. We first learned about the duo — RCA product-design grads Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves — during this year's Noho Design District, where they showed a series of golden geometric button covers in the Once Removed show at our 22 Bond space. We were further intrigued by works like their recycled-plastic Sea Chair. But if you read our story yesterday on Kent Fonn Skåre, you already know why we find this simple office scheme particularly endearing — not only does it take advantage of pegboard to maximize wall space, but it's also inspired by "New York Art Deco meets Memphis," say the designers, and it uses a freewheeling mix of contrasting materials like marble, colored steel, linoleum, and reclaimed wood. After reading a bit more below from Murakami and Groves about how they constructed the various elements of the office, stay tuned for your chance to purchase their geometric marmoleum wall pouches, coming soon to the Sight Unseen shop!

07.30.12

Up and Coming

Kent Fonn Skåre, Artist and Graphic Designer

Being that he's still a student at Konstfack in Stockholm, you've probably never heard of Norwegian artist and graphic designer Kent Fonn Skåre. But his work, even at first glance, is ridiculously easy to love: It's got a heavy focus on materials, lots of marble, and a whiff of Memphis — yes, the three "M"s, the golden trifecta of the current avant-garde, or at least the little corner of it that we're obsessed with, which also includes folks like Clemence Seilles and Jens Praet. We discovered Fonn Skåre via a fleeting image on Pinterest, but found surprisingly little information on him and the ideas behind his work, so we did what we do best, harassing the poor man until we were able to tease out a bit of insight into his practice. Check out the interview and accompanying photos here, then bookmark Fonn Skåre's Flickr feed to browse more of his graphic design work and follow his future projects.

07.24.12

Sighted

The 2012 Parsons Thesis Site

As curatorial hunter-gatherers, we're always on the lookout for new and unseen talents, and there's no better place to spot them than at school thesis shows. But as workaholics who seldom have time to leave our home offices, much less attend these shows, they all too often remain off-limits to us. It's a rare yet celebrated occasion any time we're either sent a clear, comprehensive accounting of projects by graduating students, or become aware of a website that successfully catalogs them. Last week, we received an email from Parsons with just such a treat — the new multi-disciplinary Parsons thesis site, part of the two-year old Parsons Festival which flings open the doors of the school to the public each May for three weeks of exhibitions, workshops, and fashion shows. Grateful to have access to the event's couch-potato version, we sifted through all the projects on the site and found the six we liked best: humorously cloying photographs of weird dollar-store finds by Antonia Basler, a series of poured-concrete side tables made in fabric molds by Isaac Friedman-Heiman, dresses that pay homage to Muybridge and Noguchi by Kaoru Oshima, photos by Charlie Rubin that blur the line between the real and the artificial, and minimalist versus maximalist origami garments by Yingshi June Lin and Si Lu. Have a look at the slideshow here, which is annotated with selections from the students' thesis statements, then clear your calendar for next May so you'll have no excuse not to join us at next year's festival.

07.18.12

8 Things

Roanne Adams, Founder and Creative Director at RoAndCo

If you've been to one of her fashion presentations or received one of her elaborate invitations in the mail, you might be surprised to hear graphic designer and art director Roanne Adams describe her business as "not the edgiest design firm." This, after all, is a woman who's so well known for her career-launching work for emerging fashion stars like Abigail Lorick and Timo Weiland that brands often come crawling to her for infusions of downtown cool. Yet if she's managed to turn RoAndCo into one of the most up-and-coming boutique firms in New York at the moment, it's because her little-known clients like Rachael Ray and Zappos have just as much respect for her work as folks like TenOverSix do, which has a lot to do with Adams's instinctive approach to design: Rather than competing to be the most avant-garde kid on the block, she prefers putting new twists on familiar ideas from the past, researching a brand's history or creating narratives around those who don't have one. Her inspirations, as enumerated in the pages of our book Paper View and elaborated on here, run to the likes of Guy Bourdin and '70s advertising icons. "I''ve always been more into Paul Rand and Herb Lubalin than contemporary designers," Adams says.

07.12.12

Sighted

Bec Brittain’s Lattice Candelabra

When we last did a studio visit with Bec Brittain, we made a brief mention of her new candelabra design, which — as depicted in that slideshow — was just a formless pile of metal tube segments at the time. While it's still something of a work in progress, Brittain decided to share it with Sight Unseen readers today anyway, originally planning to photograph it on the High Line and then ultimately finding inspiration a bit closer to home. And when we say home, we mean the building that houses her Red Hook studio, also referenced briefly in our March story: the E.R. Butler headquarters and production facility, which we only got a quick glimpse of that day, but whose awesomeness we may have failed to properly convey. It's a 10,000 square foot renovated warehouse with a hauntingly beautiful courtyard and the kind of gritty factory floor most makers go nuts for, and in the photos she shot for us, Brittain borrowed that industrial scenery to use as a metaphor for her own working process.

07.11.12

Studio Visit

Cristina Grajales Gallery

At the Armory Show this past November, Cristina Grajales had an original Jean Royère Polar Bear sofa in her booth, which sold for “half a million in minutes,” she recalls. Grajales has had plenty of experience dealing in 20th-century masterpieces like these — both in her decade-long stint directing 1950 for Delorenzo and at the helm of her 12-year-old eponymous gallery in Soho — and yet her own most cherished piece isn’t some icon of modernism at all. It’s not even a design object, but a 19th-century Naga warrior costume she bought at the Tribal Art Fair, and as a mainstay of the large office and presentation room she keeps behind her gallery, only her clients and artists ever get to see it. Of course it’s they, if any, who understand Grajales’s working methods best; they come to her precisely because she looks at objects “as sculptures, for what they are,” and says she’s “not afraid to put together, say, an 18th-century Portuguese table with a contemporary silver tray.” Which is why we figured a privileged peek inside her back room, captured earlier this year by our trusty photographer Mike Vorrasi, might be the ideal way for our readers to get to know her, too.

06.26.12

Sighted

New Work By My Bauhaus Is Better Than Yours

From the start, the young Weimar students behind My Bauhaus Is Better Than Yours gave themselves a crushingly large reputation to live up to. Not their alma mater's creative legacy, mind you, but those tote bags, given away when the collective-turned-production company launched in 2009. Bearing its name in a thin block print, the bags made for the perfect product even before you saw the group's actual work, and for awhile you couldn't turn a single corner at a design event without running into someone wearing one. But to the credit of the now Berlin-based company's founders — graphic designers Manuel Goller and Daniel Burchard — each furniture collection continues to hit the proverbial nail on the head, combining appealingly graphic shapes with just the right dose of functionality. Earlier this week, My Bauhaus re-launched its webshop with a new design, lower prices, and new products, some of which debuted earlier this year in Milan. We asked three of the designers behind those works to send us a list of five things that inspired their piece, from Bret Easton Ellis to solitaire.

06.14.12

Fair Report

At dOCUMENTA (13)

You don't go to Kassel, Germany (population 195,000) to eat delicious food or sightsee, and you certainly don't go there to shop. It's not even the kind of place that has that old-world, small-town charm. Kassel has one thing and one thing only: dOCUMENTA, the massive art show that was founded there in 1955 and takes place once every five years, pairing all the right it-names of any given half-decade's contemporary scene with all the right coolly obscure ones plucked from modern history. Earlier this week, I ventured out to Kassel from my temporary summer roost in Berlin to visit dOCUMENTA (13), curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; in two days, I managed to see only about a half to two-thirds of the work woven throughout the show's two-dozen or so venues, not including a park full of sculptures and conceptual dog runs that I particularly regret missing. I took nearly 200 photographs, half of which are now posted on Facebook — check out a sampling here, then follow this link over to Sight Unseen's page to see the rest, including an "invisible" installation by the inimitable Ryan Gander that left a very curious byproduct on the floor...

06.11.12

Studio Visit

Symbols + Rituals, via Where They Create

We first spotted the collaboration between Nanse Kawashima and Eri Nagasaka on Dossier magazine's website, where the writer noted that "it’s kind of hard to describe what exactly Symbols + Rituals is." To us, it looked like a perfectly curated collection of vintage curios, some sleek and some dark and witchy — Super Normal meets supernatural.

06.07.12

Fair Report

At Sofia Design Week

This past weekend, Sight Unseen was invited to participate in Sofia Design Week, where I gave a lecture to the members of Bulgaria's design community about how and why we do what we do here. (Other speakers included Stefan Sagmeister, Raw Edges, Bas van Beek, Numen/For Use, and my new faves Abäke.) Unsurprisingly, it was my first time in Bulgaria, so I couldn't resist taking photos — both of the city's strange and wonderful sights, and of the few design objects I had time to check out while not watching my fellow speakers hold forth in the lecture hall, like this chair by London-based Marina Dragomirova that uses traditional Bulgarian carpet-weaving techniques. We've just posted a photo album on Sight Unseen's Facebook page; have a look, and don't forget to like us while you're at it!

06.05.12

Q+A

With Martin Lorenz, Co-Editor of Pretty Ugly

There are moments, when leafing through the pages of Gestalten's latest opus Pretty Ugly, that you'll feel a little perplexed. Not by the stretched and layered type that practitioners of the New Ugly graphics movement use to obscure the messages contained in their work, nor by the fact that brands and organizations are trying to sell themselves with these deliberately obtuse images. What you'll find so confusing, rather, is just how beautiful most of the projects appear, despite their creators' best attempts at visual rebellion — a fact acknowledged by the book's editors, Lupi Asensio and Martin Lorenz of the Barcelona-based firm twopoints.net, in its oxymoronic title.

06.01.12

Fair Report

At New York Design Week 2012, Part IV: The Rest

At 8:15 AM on Monday, May 21, I heard it in my sleep: thunder, really loud thunder, loud enough to wake me up and send me flying to the window in a panic. The Noho Design District's 22 Bond space had shown signs of roof leakage during setup earlier that week, and with torrential downpours seeming imminent, I threw on shoes and glasses and rushed meet Jill at the space to begin damage control. Thus went the day, as we scrambled to clean up puddles and position buckets underneath the growing indoor deluge, our dreams of making it to the rest of New York Design Week's offsite shows slipping away from us by the hour. We'd seen Wanted Design and Matter the day before, but as fate would have it, there would be no Boffo Show House for us this year, nor would we make it to Model Citizens, despite a valiant effort which saw us sprinting up the stairs of the venue fifteen minutes before the show was scheduled to close, only to find that almost everyone had packed up early. Luckily the American Design Club's Raw + Unfiltered exhibition at Heller Gallery — part two of the Karlsson's Unfiltered project — remained on view later that week, so we paid it a belated visit. (The Boffo house is up through June 4, though as of press time we hadn't been able to get there quite yet; ditto for the Herman Miller pop-up shop, on until July 1.) Next year, if they haven't quite perfected cloning technology just yet, we at least hope to nip this problem in the bud with a more foolproof modern invention: interns.