03.21.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

An Immersive Interplay of Light and Color at Volume Gallery in Chicago

The Chicago studio Luftwerk have made a career out of exploring the interplay of color, light, and colored light, as so many artists before them have done and so many will continue to do. But the defining factor of their work has always been its interaction with architecture, whether the duo were projection-mapping a light show onto Falling Water or bouncing trippy patterns off Anish Kapoor's bean in Millennial Park. This month, however, they left behind that construct to mount their first solo gallery show, at Chicago's Volume Gallery, where it's their ideas alone that are on display.
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03.20.18

Up and Coming

At a New Show, Thomas Barger Upcycles Your IKEA Discards Into Collectible Design

At just 25 years old, Thomas Barger finds himself wrestling with the ordinary — the idea that he’ll soon be kicked off his parents’ health insurance when he turns 26 — and the extraordinary — raising a solo show of sculptural furniture, on view through March 31 at Salon 94 Design. A recent nod from Architectural Digest and a sale to prominent art dealer and collector Javier Peres also signal Barger’s ascendency into the artistic stratosphere. But while all of these realities point to his newfound adulthood, the works on display at the gallery look backwards to the underpinnings of a youth spent growing up gay on a farm in Mattoon, Illinois.
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03.19.18

Sighted

If You Can’t Get a Table at Noma, At Least Now You Can Buy a Piece of the Decor

Talk about the ultimate design karma: Two friends graduate from the design program at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, conceive two vases in pigmented concrete as Christmas presents for their mothers, and just like that are discovered on Instagram by the designers behind Noma — aka the best restaurant in the world — and commissioned to create three new styles for the restaurant's recently reopened Copenhagen location.
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03.17.18

Saturday Selects

Week of March 12, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: greatest hits from the Collectible fair in Brussels, new vases and bags that indulge our longtime obsession with hammered metal, and the design-y beach towels giving us a reason to start dreaming about summer.
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03.15.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Always Wanted Your Work Featured At Our OFFSITE Show? Here’s Your Chance.

Last year's OFFSITE Selects exhibition was such a success that we're repeating it at this year's show — which will take place at 201 Mulberry Street, May 17-20 — and today we're pleased to issue an open call for submissions. If you have a brand-new, never-before-seen piece (or 3) that you'd like to debut with us during New York Design Week, submit an application by March 21, and we'll choose the very best submissions to join the show.
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10.16.15

Graphic Design

$100 Posters by Graphic Designer Nigel Evan Dennis

Chicago-based Nigel Evan Dennis is one of those graphic designers who does it all, from album art to campaigns for New Balance and Nike. The work we're showcasing today, however, is a series of affordable posters (each one sells for $100 in limited editions of 20) he's designed as part of his personal work.
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03.14.18

Fair Report

The Best Things We Saw at NADA, The Armory, and Independent

Design is ingrained in us so deeply, it even affects our taste in art; at this week's art fairs in New York, we were consistently drawn to things like plywood sculptures, powder-coated metal wall hangings, antiquity-inspired ceramics, degradé textile panels, the fact that fave artist Mattea Perrotta TURNED A PAINTING INTO A RUG, and, of course, Katie Stout lamps — i.e. things that wouldn't be totally out of place at a design show.
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03.13.18

Fair Report

10 Things We Loved at the 2018 Collective Design Fair

There were, to say the least, a lot of changes at Collective Design this year — the largest, of course, being the week in which it was held. But ironically, the year that Collective broke from NYCxDesign's May calendar and moved to coincide with the Armory, Independent, and NADA, is the year it featured the most instances of contemporary furniture yet.
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03.12.18

Q+A

Fiberglass, Corian, Rubber, and Resin: Welcome to the Materials-Obsessed World of Wentrcek/Zebulon

Brooklyn design duo Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon began making work together six years ago as Wintercheck Factory. And while their moniker has recently changed, their work has always derived its impact from the tension between the what and the why — the “what” being a material language that enforces approachability, and the “why” embedded in how it all comes together to elevate the mundane.
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03.10.18

Saturday Selects

Week of March 5, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: ceramic chainmail becomes a verifiable trend, Hyperallergic not-so-subtly shades The Armory, and the 26-year-old behind the @EttoreSottsass Instagram handle has more covetable furniture than our small staff combined.
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03.08.18

Up and Coming

In Artisan-Heavy Guatemala, a Young Maker Forging a New Path in Industrial Design

The last time we featured the work of Sofia Véliz — a two-piece set of folded-steel gallery furniture made for a Diego Sagastume exhibition — we wondered what else the Guatemala City designer might have up her sleeve. Over a year and a half later, we’re finding out: From extracting rubber powder from tires to seeking inspiration from Finnish film sets, to exploring the balance between utilitarian design and the urge to experiment, there’s no question that the 25-year-old designer keeps herself busy.
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Detroit designer Chris Schanck at Friedman Benda
03.07.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Show, Chris Schanck Debuts Furniture Fit for an Alien King

If you're familiar with Detroit-based designer Chris Schanck's work, you can probably easily conjure an image of it in your mind — primitive yet shiny, lumpen yet somehow slick at the same time. Since 2011, when he was an MFA student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Schanck has been developing and refining a technique he calls Alufoil, which is responsible for that shiny, otherworldly aesthetic — it often looks as though Schanck is making executive furniture for an alien king.
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03.05.18

Interiors

In Dreary London, A Mediterranean Eatery Inspired By the Sun

Are there new restaurants out there that aren't inspired by the seaside? First we had the Italian Riviera, then the Sydney coast, and now Omar's Place — a restaurant located smack in the middle of London but inspired by the Mediterranean. The interior was shaped by Sella Concept, a London-based female design duo whose concept for the space started with idea of the sun — the defining element of Mediterranean lifestyle.
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