09.27.16

Up and Coming

Beautiful Objects Built to Last, By a Tech Refugee Turned Furniture Designer

Not every designer considers UI when approaching a furniture collection, but then Zürich-based Isabell Gatzen isn’t every designer: A brief stint in Silicon Valley a few years back left her disillusioned with the short product lifecycle that seems to be a hallmark of so much tech industry innovation and eager to apply strategic thinking to a more traditional craft.

More

09.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Pink Houses and Ombré Hot Tubs, On View at a Los Angeles Gallery

An ombré hot tub, a bubblegum pink house, gorgeous, multi-colored, woven wall-hangings — Kayne Corcoran Griffin’s current two-person show with Mika Tajima and Jean-Pascal Flavien is chock full of splashy sculptures, paintings, weavings, installations and more that are right up our alley. The two artists are fascinated with the human tendency to gather in groups, and both Tajima and Flavien create playful work that explores what happens at those sites of assembly.

More

09.24.16

Saturday Selects

Week of September 19, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a legendary design archive opens in Basel, a beloved textile duo moves into rugs, and a refurbished Schindler house becomes the home of our California dreams.

More

09.23.16

Fair Report

The Best of 2016’s London Design Festival

Because many of London's top designers create work throughout the year for international galleries or the Milan Furniture Fair, the LDF, in its best years, feels less about splashy furniture debuts and more about experimentation and collaboration. The stakes are lower, the opportunity for delight is higher. Here are some of the best things we found this year.

More

09.22.16

Studio Visit

Bower On Becoming One of the Hottest Studios in American Design

Bower's products and furniture always feel just right for the moment in which they're made, somehow ahead of what's current but not so trendy that they'll soon fall out of fashion. That these sophisticated harbingers are made from an enormous Brooklyn woodshop with no A/C seems about right when you meet them.

More

04.01.14

Sighted

Amanda Ringstad, Photographer

Amanda Ringstad is a Seattle-based still-life and product photographer, and though there's remarkably little written about her on the internet, the information that's there makes perfect sense the instant you look at her work. She has a BFA in photography and studied sculpture and art theory in graduate school; in practice, this translates to the most arresting images you've ever seen of staples, garlic shoots, and those weird foam thingys you put between your toes during a pedicure.

More

09.22.16

Interiors

We Outfitted Fashion Week’s Coolest Pop-Up With This Painted-Plywood Furniture

Refinery29's 29Rooms event is basically a funhouse of art and culture, where each room presents its own mega-Instagrammable moment. But what if you need a teeny tiny break from all that selfie-ing? That's where we came in. When Refinery asked Sight Unseen to curate the 29Rooms lounge area, we turned immediately to Bower, who came back at us just a few hours later with a sketch for this amazing collection.

More

09.20.16

At Home With

Calico Wallpaper’s Envy-Inducing Airy Red Hook Loft

In hindsight, it feels almost like fate that Nick and Rachel Cope would end up in the sprawling, historic Red Hook loft they now call home. After all, where else in New York City could they have found the room to showcase not one but six of the wallpaper collections they've created since 2012 as partners in the Brooklyn-based Calico?

More

09.19.16

Graphic Design

A New Photographic Series Channels All Our Favorite Trends

When we first met our frequent collaborator Pippa Drummond, it was via a series drawn from her personal portfolio: Using beauty-salon staples, in collaboration with a prop-stylist friend, she created beautiful assemblages with a fair amount of optical trickery. (The fake nails and brushes, disassociated from their typical use, became almost random, abstract shapes.) Her latest work employs an optical-illusion effect as well, but the Barbara Kasten-y aesthetic here is more sophisticated, drawn as it is from a series of high-brow influences.

More

09.17.16

Saturday Selects

Week of September 12, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Moroccan-inspired rugs by way of Paris, a conceptual one-day gallery-cum-exhibition and an octogenarian design couple finally making it onto our collective radar.

More

09.16.16

Excerpt: Book

Inside Jonas Wood’s Perspective-Bending Interior World

The LA artist Jonas Wood currently has a new exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery; called Portraits, it depicts various loved ones — his family on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah; his wife, Shio Kusaka, with an unruly-haired dog — in Wood's signature colorful, mise-en-abyme–happy style. (We like to think of it as Henri Rousseau, if Rousseau lived in 2016 Culver City). But our favorite Wood era remains Interiors, the 2012 catalogue that's being re-issued this week and that we're excerpting on the site today.

More

09.14.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Breathtaking Furniture Installation Staged Inside a Famed Brutalist House

When we named Jonathan Muecke to our American Design Hot list in 2014, the enigmatic Minnesota architect summed up his motivations with a 1963 George Brecht quote about seeking precision in objects — the same kind of precision, presumably, that he saw in the starkly angular 1974 Van Wassenhove House by Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, where he recently spent a week making a new body of work for Maniera gallery.

More

09.13.16

Sighted

Kelly Behun x Barneys: A Patterned Pop-Up, Where Maximalism Prevails

For Barneys New York, Kelly Behun and her team have created an immersive pop-up and capsule collection, on view through October 31st, that translates the studio's super graphic design aesthetic into a collection of items for the home. Called A Kook Milieu, the pop-up was inspired in part by the pattern and decoration–obsessed 1970s New York gallerist Holly Solomon, who was known for blurring the line between art and design.

More