06.21.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

You’ll Never Guess Which California Town is Undergoing an Art Renaissance — Thanks, In Part, to This New Artist-Run Gallery

Here at Sight Unseen, we could of course rattle off a long list of renowned, influential city centers for art and design: Berlin, Mexico City, Seoul, Copenhagen, New York and more. But lately, Long Beach, California, has landed on our radar — yes, you heard right, Long Beach, home to the Queen Mary and Snoop Dogg, where, later this summer, a new art gallery called In Various Forms will open.

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06.07.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Step Inside Object & Thing, An Intimate Art Exhibit at the 1955 Home Gerald Luss Built for Himself

The new Object & Thing exhibition, created in collaboration with Blum & Poe and Mendes Wood DM at the Gerald Luss House in Ossining, New York, opened on May 7. Since then, I've basically treated it like the design equivalent of the Mare of Easttown finale, trying to shield myself from spoilers on social media until I could visit in person last Friday. And yet, when I got there, I realized that this was a relatively pointless task: No image can replicate the feeling of stillness that comes from being inside a house that's as well-considered as the Luss House, and no Instagram tour can capture all the details that make this particular collaboration so satisfying.

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05.05.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Blistered Leather and Melted Aluminum — Soft Baroque’s New Works Were Inspired By the Sun

After a year of pretty much everything being on hold, we’re finally seeing the fruits of some of that pre-COVID labor. For those of us here in Milan, that means projects originally slated for the canceled 2020 Design Week are at last seeing the light of day. One of the better projects to have made it out the other side is Sun City, a collaboration between PIN-UP magazine, Soft Baroque, and Marséll, the Milanese footwear brand. Set over three levels in Marséll’s headquarters in an ex-factory in the Porta Romana district, Soft Baroque debuted — during the Digital Design Days in April — a slew of new work, each piece loosely inspired by the sun.

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05.03.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Motherhood — And the Ways In Which It Challenges Us to Create — Is At the Center of This Exhibition

The idea for Egg Collective's third "Designing Women" exhibition was born long before the pandemic struck. Back in 2018, Egg's co-founders — Hilary Petrie, Crystal Ellis, and Stephanie Beamer, along with Ellis's sister, the artist Tealia Ellis Ritter — had the idea to curate a selection of female artists and designers who also happened to be mothers, and who often worked with or chafed against the constraints of motherhood in order to create.

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04.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Gallery Show in London Takes Wood to Unexpected Places

Maybe it's because I've been watching Ellen's Next Great Designer (which, honestly, you should be as well, it's highly entertaining and it features THREE former Sight Unseen subjects!), but an exhibition where designers riff on the range and versatility of wood feels extremely low-stakes. (Also not a knock; it's an appropriately sized brief for coming out of a year of lockdown). But that's also what makes it all the more impressive that Gallery FUMI's first exhibition of 2021, called The Beautiful Grain and featuring 11 of the gallery's artists, should be so insanely inventive.

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04.27.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Canadian Design Show Was Dreamed Up Before the Pandemic. So Why Is It About Mutation, Isolation, and Fear of the Unknown?

Set in an abandoned, somewhat post-apocalyptic-looking building in the middle of Montréal, FICTIONS offers visitors a surveillance-like experience, with four different camera angles offering a glimpse of the half-shrouded pieces, alongside an eerie accompanying score. Though there was no brief, many of the pieces play with ideas about mutation and perception.

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04.19.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Stacey Rees’s Abstract Female Portraits Capture a Moment of Inner Contemplation

In her previous works, the Australian painter Stacey Rees seemed to be captivated by the strange and modern notion of the selfie. Her portraits explored the idea that people can define their self-worth by the public face they show to the world and that people can, in fact, manipulate those images for a better outcome. What comprised the inner life of those who swore by such digital machinations, she seemed to ask? In her new body of work, which was on view this month at the Sydney gallery Saint Cloche, Rees appears to sink even deeper into the stillness of contemplation.

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04.02.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Exhibition, Abstract Paintings and Anthropomorphic Vessels Pair Perfectly

In ballet terms, a pas de deux is a duet. Two dancers perform a sequence in such perfect, excruciating synchronicity that it appears they are, for the fleeting moments they inhabit the stage, two halves of the same whole. This kind of creative coupling is what curator Kitty Clark had in mind when she put together her latest show, Soul Bed, featuring painter Hannah Nowlan and ceramic artist Tatsiana Shevarenkova, which just opened its doors at Saint Cloche Gallery in Sydney, Australia.

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03.25.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Caesar Salad Chandelier is the Centerpiece of This New Exhibition

At her new gallery show, Thank You For The Nice Fire, Chloe Wise employs food to great, grotesque effect: The show's centerpiece is a Caesar Salad Chandelier studded with croutons, its urethane romaine lettuce leaves fanning out like rococo paillettes, its milky "dressing" dripping into a puddle on the gallery floor below. Atop glass block plinths, there are thick mounds of waxy butter, punctuated by ears of corn; in one painting, a bodiless hand appears to want to plunge its fingers into a pile of garlic.

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03.23.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

An Iconic Children’s Book is the Inspiration Behind This Incredibly Joyous Exhibition

A friend of mine and I have often joked about how Goodnight Moon, the classic 1947 children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, would make an excellent moodboard for a gloriously maximalist interior design project: The incredible color blocking! The striped drapes! The scalloped picture frames! The animal hide rug! And while we still would love to see those benchmarks turned into something truly livable, a new exhibition has done the next best thing.

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03.19.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

For Its Second Fully Virtual Outing, This Danish Design Exhibition Gets Personal

Mindcraft's interactive website includes individual designer pages, video interviews with the 10 Danish designers and studios, an AR component, and a 3D experience. Of course, as with any exhibition like this, the bells and whistles don't add up to much unless the quality of the work is there to support it, and in this case, thankfully, that is true. But while the AR component is interesting, it's the videos that provide both context and emotional heft.

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03.16.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

16 Talents to Watch From This Year’s Stockholm Design Week

Stockholm was one of the few design fairs that slid in under the wire, early in 2020 before the world shut down. So it makes even more sense that the fair's organizers decided to exercise prudence and call this year's edition off. Greenhouse, the section of the fair that's typically home to design schools and talents to watch, was presented digitally, while some of the schools — including Konstfack and Beckmans — banded together for a group show in town.

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