11.14.17

American Design Hot List

The 2017 Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our fifth annual 2017 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s annual editorial award for the 20 names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second four Hot List designers here: Charles Hollis Jones, Chen Chen & Kai Williams, Elyse Graham, and Eny Lee Parker.

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11.13.17

American Design Hot List

The 2017 Hot List, Part I

Today we announced our 2017 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen's unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 20 names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the first group of Hot List designers here.

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11.13.17

American Design Hot List

Our 2017 Honorees

It's that time of year again! Today, we're pleased to announce the honorees of our fifth annual American Design Hot List — an unapologetically subjective editorial award for the 20 names to know now in American design.

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11.13.17

Fair Report

Our Favorite Finds from the 2017 Salon Art + Design

We've never been ones who needed an excuse to dress up, so last Thursday we happily headed uptown to the Park Avenue Armory for The Salon Art + Design, generally considered to be New York's fanciest design fair. We've only recently begun attending the Salon in part because the fair has only recently reached a tipping point, where the quality and number of boundary-pushing contemporary pieces matches the number of vintage ones on display — all of which, of course, reflects a more general trend in the collectible design world.

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11.11.17

Saturday Selects

Week of November 6, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: amazing handwoven textiles from a current RISD student, a RESIST-themed issue from Romance Journal, a Brooklyn renovation by a husband-and-wife dream team (above) and a recently launched job board from our friends at Design Milk.

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09.02.15

Up and Coming

Melbourne Artist Matthew Dettmer

Melbourne-based Matthew Dettmer's work spans painting and sculpture, but in Dettmer's hands, those practices become relatively indistinct from one another. "During art school, I was painting photos and images that I'd found. But there was no reason the outcome needed to be a painting when it could just exist as a photo. So I started making sculptures of found objects or forms that didn’t exist — ones that I wished did."

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11.10.17

Sighted

At The Future Perfect, Bec Brittain’s SHY Lights Grow Up

Bec Brittain has been playing with different configurations of her constellation-like SHY Lights ever since they debuted all the way back in 2012. But because each light is constricted only by the width and length of an LED tube, as well as Brittain's own boundless imagination, the possibilities are quite literally endless. So for a new show at The Future Perfect, called Resolute, Brittain began experimenting with the path and quality of the light source itself rather than the configuration of the tubes.

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11.10.17

Sighted

Two Furniture Collections That Prove the Mexican Design Scene Is on the Rise

By now you've all heard some variation on the rumor that Mexico City is the new Berlin; maybe you've even had an artist friend make good on their threats to move down there. Certainly it's a city that everyone suddenly has big plans to visit, and for good reason — the Mexican art and design scenes are increasingly (for lack of a better word) hot right now, and if our report last year from design week didn't convince you of the latter, these projects by PLDO and Savvy Studio just might.

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11.09.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Bricks, Rubber, Concrete, and Stone: Field Experiments’ New Collection is Made From the Building Blocks of NYC

When Benjamin Harrison Bryant, Paul Marcus Fuog, and Karim Charlebois-Zariffa founded Field Experiments in 2013, they were inspired by the prospect of venturing to an exotic locale, removing themselves from their daily lives, and having that new place inform their work. But in their latest venture — a show at Brooklyn’s Fisher Parrish gallery on view through December 17 — the terrain has shifted to the familiar: New York City.

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11.09.17

Up and Coming

These Chilean Stone Vessels Are Our Newest South American Design Obsession

While there's no official equivalent of Slow Food in the design world, there will always be something particularly nice about projects that take the same traditionally made, locally focused approach — especially when the results have as contemporary an aesthetic as Rodrigo Bravo's new Monolith Series, which was crafted by a Chilean artisan out of Chilean stone.

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11.08.17

Up and Coming

Meet the Up and Coming Finnish Illustrator Behind the Sight Unseen Suitcase Print

Earlier this year, when we began to think about who might design the pattern that would adorn the interior of the Arlo Skye x Sight Unseen suitcase, we first established a few parameters: We wanted the suitcase to be more sophisticated than playful, but to still embody the warm, colorful, graphic sensibility that we tend to favor. We needed the print to repeat, but we wanted the pattern to have the illusion of being more random. And we hoped that we might be able to shine a light on a lesser-known, up-and-coming talent.

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11.08.17

Up and Coming

Brutalist- and Bauhaus-Inspired Housewares and Lighting From the Duo Behind Material Lust

Christian Swafford and Lauren Larson, the creative couple behind Material Lust, introduced their sister brand Orphan Work humbly enough, with a soft launch last year that had us wondering what, exactly, the brand even was. But since its debut, the label has evolved beyond its origins as “an exploration of orphaned material” and developed into a full-fledged brand: lighting, accessories, and what they call “monuments for your tabletop,” inspired at turns by Bauhaus and Brutalism, but mainly by the Vienna Secession.

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11.07.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Fake Wood, Real Stone, and Imagined Foam: Our Favorite Collection from the Operae Design Fair

This year's Operae show was curated by Alice Stori Lichtenstein and the fair, always notable for its mix of designers and galleries, featured Sight Unseen favorites like Campbell Rey, Carwan Gallery, and Maniera. It was the latter gallery who hosted our favorite presentation: a series of layered particle-board furniture developed by the Belgium firm aDVVT as well as a newer series called "Light Conversation Pieces," by the Italian architecture firm Piovenefabi.

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