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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kelly Behun x Barneys
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.
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11.12.14

Sighted

Marten Elder in 01 Magazine

Sometimes you have to laugh at your own predictability. It was love at first sight when I first saw these images of Los Angeles photographer Marten Elder's work in the fantastic new issue of 01 Magazine (which also features SU faves like Oeuffice and Doug Johnston). But when I began to read the article, it became immediately clear to me why: Elder studied at Bard College, where his senior project advisor was Stephen Shore, another visual fascination of mine. But while Elder's older work is more like Shore's in its exquisitely faithful representation of a banal reality, his newer work represents a more color-saturated view of those equally ordinary vistas (a concrete street corner, a stack of scaffolding.) The accompanying interview is great, so we're excerpted part of it, as well as our favorite images, here. Go to 01's current issue for the full article, then visit Elder's website for even more images.
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09.10.16

Saturday Selects

Week of September 5, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from our trip to Oslo, an internet wormhole that led us to a Modernist jewelry icon, and a trio of store interiors that are the very definition of "warm minimalism."
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09.09.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Gallery Show as Studio Visit: Ana Kraš at Les Gens Heureux

Staged in an enviably spartan top-floor apartment in the heart of Copenhagen, gallery Les Gens Heureux’s current exhibition Visit allows for an intimate glimpse into the oeuvre of one of our favorite young makers, Ana Kraš. The solo exhibition features the Serbian-born photographer, illustrator, product designer, and part-time model’s most recent works, produced over the course of the last year in her adoptive hometown of New York.
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Dropbox mural by New York graphic designers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba
09.07.16

Graphic Design

A Tech-Office Mural is the Ultimate Canvas for These Graphic Designers

By now, the large-scale mural has become something of a familiar, de rigueur decoration for tech HQs — the past few years have seen everything from Trek Matthews for Dolby Labs, to Serena Mitnik-Miller for Facebook, Ian Ross for Lyft, Camille Walala (also for Facebook) and more. But this latest might be our favorite yet: Commissioned for Dropbox's 26,000-square-foot Flatiron office in New York, the mural we're featuring today is a collaboration between New York graphic designers and former Kickstarter co-workers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba of Studio Proba.
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Sam Amoia New York interior designer
09.06.16

At Home With

Inside the Zen-like Space of One of New York’s Top Interior Designers

Walk into any number of chic boutiques in the world —the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, Dior in London, Dover Street Market in New York — and you're bound to see the work of Samuel Amoia, the interior designer–turned–furniture phenom who's shot to stardom in the last few years making pieces that mix high and low materials, and incorporate healing minerals and crystals such as amethyst, malachite, pyrite, onyx, and agate. But there's one place you won't find many examples of Amoia's work — in the spare, textural one-bedroom Chelsea apartment he's shared for five years with his boyfriend, Enrique, and two dogs, Pig and Bruno.
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08.29.16

Sighted

These Tiny, Affordable Nudes Put a Contemporary Spin on a Classical Genre

As NG Collective Studio, sisters Laura Naples and Kristen Giorgi sell their collaborative artworks on Uprise Art, an online gallery representing up and coming talents. That's where we spotted these gestural watercolor Mini Nudes. "I played around with the concept of how, using color and shape, the nude figures could relate to modern elements that we currently see in design and fashion," Giorgi says.
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08.27.16

Saturday Selects

Week of August 22, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an upstate favorite invades the West Village, an espresso bar flourishes in Florence, and two Danish design icons make beautiful magic together (in ceramic, of course).
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08.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Shiny Cubes and Popsicle Sticks in a California Light & Space Artist’s Retrospective

It’s a sweltering hot day in downtown Los Angeles when I visit California Light and Space artist Peter Alexander’s career retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, but I feel immediately refreshed upon entering. It isn’t just the effect of the A/C, but also of Alexander’s geometric polyurethane sculptures, their glistening surfaces at once enticingly reflective and mysteriously opaque.
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