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05.25.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Christopher Norman is Turning the Castoff Urban Trees of Los Angeles Into Art

Los Angeles–based architect and designer Christopher Norman’s new collection of hand-machined minimal forms resists standardization. His untitled “extrusions” in ash and cedar and pine riff on a hardware aesthetic, while maintaining the organic ethos seen in much of his other, more fluidly-shaped work. Forgoing pre-cut lumber, Norman uses wood from freshly cut trees. “If you’re working with commercial wood, you get a very normalized look and set of proportions. It’s basically highly mediated,” he explains.
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05.23.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

From Lava Stone to Hempcrete: The First of Our Offsite Selects Round-Ups

Ever since we began hosting our Sight Unseen Offsite fair, it has always featured both full collection launches as well as a more gallery-like section called Selects, the latter meant to highlight only a piece or two each by a large, diverse group of designers. Now that our physical show has become Offsite Online, we’ve kept the Selects concept in tact, and we’re presenting those individual works in roundups on our main feed over the next three Saturdays. View the first one here.
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05.22.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

JUMBO’s Founders on the Science of Cuteness — And Why They’re Endlessly Inspired By the Emoji

Trained as architects, Donnelly and Lee design objects that seem seamless, almost immaterial, just arrangements of color and form. Working in this gap between representation and object could be no less prescient — as if we weren’t experiencing much of the world mediated by screens already, social distancing due to the pandemic has only increased our reliance on digital intermediaries.
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Supaform Offsite Online
05.21.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Supaform’s New Collection Goes Neutral, Removing What He Calls the “Fancy Husk” of Color

Supaform’s latest collection — a shelf, chair, coffee table, bench, and lamp called Fancy-Routine and debuting at Offsite Online — possess similar characteristics to those in his imagined renderings: clean, curvy lines; off-kilter forms; and a resistance to revealing how exactly they come together. Composed of what he calls "rusty metal", Maxim Scherbakov says his starting point for the collection was the idea of degradation — how even a shiny chrome surface can be eaten away if it’s left long enough.
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Tantuvi Travertine Collection Offsite Online
05.20.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Tantuvi’s New Rugs Were Inspired By the Travertine Quarries of India and the Spanish Steps of Rome

On car journeys throughout India, Tantuvi's founder Arati Rao and Adam Sipe often pass through cities and villages set against a dramatic landscape of marble and quartz quarries, mountains, sand dunes, magical desert lakes, and jungles. “The sandstone color that permeates all these landscapes is always on my mind,” Rao says. “Travertine quarries are all over the region and the earth changes from beige to ochre then deep ruby as you move throughout.” These colors were the inspiration behind Tantuvi’s latest collection, fittingly called Travertine.
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BZIPPY Offsite Online
05.19.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

BZIPPY’s Outsized Ceramic Works Are the Statement in the Room — Not the Accent

If you’re lucky enough to ever see one of LA-based artist and sculptor Bari Ziperstein’s outsized ceramic works in person, the combination of scale, texture, and hue might stop you in your tracks. Her design studio, BZIPPY, creates striking, often Brutalist-inspired ceramic vases, lamps, and furniture, while within her complementary fine art practice, Ziperstein has been known to explore meticulously manicured fingers, dimensionality, or the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda. With her robust dual practice, Ziperstein welcomes decorative ceramics into the fine art conversation, and vice versa.
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05.18.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Welcome to Our First Digital Offsite Show! Here’s How — and Why — We Did It.

When our 2020 Offsite fair, scheduled to take place in May at Skylight Modern in Manhattan, was put on indefinite hold, we decided to pivot to a digital exhibition model instead — harnessing the visibility of our existing platform to create a much-needed creative and commercial outlet for the design community, as well as redefining what a fair can be in the digital age. Welcome to Offsite Online.
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05.15.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Match Made in Murano — Mattia Bonetti Fuses with Famed Glassmakers for His Latest Collection

As often as Swiss-born, Paris-based Mattia Bonetti’s singular, one-of-a-kind furniture and design pieces are described as whimsical, it would make sense that they are created, well, on a whim. The designer doesn’t release work in cohesive collections, preferring to design fantastical one-off pieces whenever inspiration strikes. Bonetti’s newest pieces, handmade in collaboration with the famed glass artisans of Murano, Italy and presented by London gallery David Gill in an online exhibition, is surprisingly subdued but no less virtuosic.
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05.14.20

Sight Unseen Projects

With Our New Membership Program, You Can Support Sight Unseen — and Get MAJOR PERKS in Return

Today we're launching SU Friends, our first official membership program, which lets you become an ongoing supporter of Sight Unseen for as little as $3 a month, while receiving a TON of special perks in return. Help ensure that Sight Unseen, which has provided a support system for contemporary designers for the past decade, can continue that support well into the next one.
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05.13.20

Sighted

Candle Wax Tables and Mattress Foam Chairs: Tour One of the Best Waste-Material Reclamations We’ve Seen

Carsten in der Elst's recent graduate project, Heavy Duty, is every design student ever's wet dream — traveling around to different regional factories, asking them to identify their primary waste materials, then collaborating with them to use their existing production processes to turn those byproducts into something new. Unlike every other design student ever, though, in der Elst's results actually transcend his original thesis, amounting to a vast collection of objects that, if a gallery like Kreo or Friedman Benda released them from a mid-career designer, we wouldn't bat an eyelash.
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05.13.20

At Home With

The Minimal, Masculine Eagle Rock Hideaway of a Top Creative Director

Since relocating to Los Angeles from New York, former Mast Brothers creative director Nathan Warkentin has devoted time to the gut renovation of the Eagle Rock home he shares with his wife and infant son. It was the first time, he says, that he’s had the chance to translate his interest in interiors fully into his own space, which is a 1,500 square-foot study in agreeable contrast: indoor collides with outdoor, antique combines with contemporary, minimalism mingles with warmth.
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