Amy Brener, artist

Brooklyn-based artist Amy Brener is all about excavating the technological artifact in her large, translucent, crystal-like sculptures. Each standing the height of an average-sized human, the totems are like some colossal peer of Thaddeus Wolfe’s ongoing Assemblage Series. Into these cast resin and concrete monoliths, Brener fossilizes decade-old Nokia phones, Fresnel lenses, and gypsum; once the cast dries, she chisels away, cracking sheets of plastic and remnants of our recent technological past, revealing sculptures that resemble the natural and the geological. The structures stand bright and vertical, weighted in a mix of familiar earthy rock formations and distant ideas of the supernatural. As Brener notes, “My pieces are artifacts from an imagined future.” Enjoy a small selection of our favorites after the jump.
More

Inka Järvinen, Graphic Designer and Printmaker

Finnish graphic artist and designer Inka Järvinen began her career with a degree in fashion from Helsinki University of Art and Design in 2005. But after graduating, she quickly discovered she preferred designing in two dimensions to three. So what do you do when you hold a diploma in something that doesn't suit your true passion? You follow those dreams back to school and get yourself a second degree! Armed with a BA in graphic design, Järvinen went on to co-found Tsto, a design agency whose hotshot clients include Artek, Levi's, and Nokia, and she continues to work on solo projects in her spare time. We especially love her graphic prints, controlled yet unpredictable. They're clean, and perfectly executed by someone that clearly understands the principles of balance, line, and pattern. We've excerpted some of our favorites after the jump.
More

CC-Tapis Rugs

An offshoot of a 1940s-era French-Persian rug house, CC-Tapis is a contemporary design label founded in 2011 and based in Milan. Each rug is hand-crafted by Tibetan artisans in Nepal using natural fibers, dyes, and processes to create a high-quality work of art. The company occasionally collaborates with artists and includes more traditional degradé wool patterns in its archive but we fell hard for these perfectly styled, geometrically-inclined specimens from their most recent catalog. Shot by Lorenzo Gironi, the photos of the collection are a perfect blend of simple colors and minimal props that bring the rugs into the third dimension with style. Check out some of our favorites below.
More

Sigrid Calon, Visual Artist

For some reason, this is the week we finally put our money where our mouth is: First we took home one of Fort Standard's beautiful, mint-colored standing bowls, and then, on a whim last Wednesday, we picked up a risograph by Dutch visual artist Sigrid Calon, who we've had on our radar for quite some time. The hardest thing about buying Calon's work is narrowing down your options to just one — each print, which is based on the Tilburg artist's interpretation of an embroidery grid, is beautifully layered, using eight gradated colors, dots, and lines to achieve endless variations. Which one would you choose? See more after the jump.
More

KONTO, Installation and Product Designers

KONTO is a collaborative installation, interior, and product design project by two Danish creatives, artist Morten Bencke and textile designer Elizabeth Kiss. The pair make things like lamps and trivets, but our favorite projects of theirs are more abstract, like the pastel totem pictured below, created for a friend's music video, or the experimental sculptural series Montage 1, featured in the rest of this post. The pair describe their work as "based on light, balance, curiosity and colors" — check out more of it after the jump.
More
Erin O'Keefe

A Former Architect, Erin O’Keefe Creates Art That Plays With Spatial Perception

Erin O'Keefe is an artist and architect based in New York and New Brunswick, Canada. Having studied architecture at Columbia's grad program, O'Keefe took her interest in spatial perception back to her art career, in which she creates sculptures and models and landscapes out of paper, plywood, and foil, which she then photographs. As she describes it: "I'm interested in the layer of distortion and misapprehension introduced by the camera as it translates three-dimensional form and space into a two-dimensional image. In architecture, there is a similar dissonance ... The representation of the building and the building itself are two radically different things, as is the photograph and its subject. This inevitable and often fruitful misalignment is the central issue in my practice." Check out our favorite examples of her work after the jump.
More
Peter Judson Memphis Design

Peter Judson’s ’80s-Inspired Illustrations Are A Playful Homage to Memphis Design

With all the talk of Memphis Design suddenly in the air — Gizmodo and L'Arcobaleno both recently name-checked Sight Unseen in stories about its not-so-recent resurgence — we thought that sharing these '80s-influenced illustrations would be a fun way to start the week. They're by recent Kingston University graduate Peter Judson, whose work is a playful homage to Sottsass and the gang but has been compared to everything from Nickelodeon cartoons to “a cheap rip off of the latter works by Roy Lichtenstein.”
More

Ben Sanders, Artist

L.A. artist Ben Sanders was already making paintings, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures when he co-founded a collaborative art direction and photography studio, Those People, not too long ago. As if all those mediums weren't enough, though, the 25-year-old Art Center College of Design graduate recently started making objects, too, in the form of ceramic pots that he finds and uses as 3-D canvases, for paintings of wildly colorful air-brushed faces compiled from playful '80s-style shapes.
More

Suzanne Antonelli, Print Designer

On her Tumblr, Suzanne Antonelli self-identifies as a printed textile designer. But in truth, the Norwich, UK–based designer's graphics have taken on such a life of their own that Antonelli has begun to be more widely known for the patterns themselves. In her webshop, those patterns are applied to vegetable ink–printed recycled paper notebooks, or, more simply, to giclee A1 posters — the better for adorning the walls of your house, which you're going to want to do in spades after perusing these images. Of her interest in print-making — and particularly of the repetitive geometries that have become her signature — Antonelli has said: "I first became interested in pattern when I was doing my foundation in Brighton. There was hardly any room in the studio and desks were on a first come first serve basis; I think that the lack of space made me focus more and I produced a lot of really small detailed work on graph paper using tiny dots to make up different blocks of pattern."
More

Studio Uribe’s FW14 Collection

We spotted the new London-based jewelry designers Studio Uribe on the shelves of one of our favorite boutiques, Hunting and Collecting in Brussels. Helmed by couple Sion and Tiffany Phillips, the brand recently launched its first collection for FW14, which pairs sleek 18K gold-plated brass with abstract striped-enamel and lapis lazuli accents.
More

Kristina Krogh, Artist and Graphic Designer

Kristina Krogh studied graphic design before setting up her own studio in Copenhagen in 2012, where she spends part of her time on freelance design projects and the rest on her extensive line of limited-edition art prints, notebooks, and notecards, pictured in this post. Her layered geometric compositions feature a mix of contrasting and complementary surface textures taken from everyday materials like marble, ply, wood, cork, and paper. "My inspiration comes from the things that surround me: a beautiful old parquet, a perfect color combination on a building, a stone floor in a church, a bike ride through Copenhagen," she says.
More

Supreme Bon Ton’s Meteorite Collection

Suprême Bon Ton is a Paris-based textile design studio helmed by Ella Perdereau, who founded it last year after traveling around India and Latin America for creative inspiration. Her first collection, Meteorite, is a series of scarves that incorporate patterns and textures from rocks and minerals. Perdereau worked with traditional textile printers in Lyon to produce the scarves, then turned to the up-and-coming photographer Florent Tanet — known for playful pastel still-lives that have been featured in the New Yorker and Wired — to photograph them. Tanet also shot Perdereau's collection of painted rocks and other reference objects, which are featured in the second half of the post.
More