04.22.15

Fair Report

At the 2015 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

Another year, another Milan. Every year we attend the behemoth furniture fair known as Salone expecting to come away with something smart to say about the current state of design. But the truth is, you spend the week bombarded with so much stuff that you're often left with just a few fleeting mental images of your favorite things, whether it's a colorful chair sheathed in Flyknit-esque sneaker material or a particularly delicious gnocchi you nearly licked off the plate. Luckily, that's what cameras are for. We shot nearly everything we saw this year, whether it was for an immediate Instagram, a file-away-for-later trend, or to share with you here, in our best of the best round-up from last week.

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04.21.15

Fair Report

Thévoz-Choquet’s New Marble Accessories Collection For Bloc Studios

Over four days spent in Milan last week at the annual furniture fair, we saw dozens of exhibitions, spent 9 hours at the fairgrounds, and shot more than 800 photos. Pretty overwhelming. While we take a moment to regroup and put together our official coverage, which starts tomorrow, we figured we'd share with you one of the few projects that we didn't photograph in Milan, but didn't need to — SU alums Josephine Choquet and Virgil Thévoz launched an extensive new collection of marble tables and housewares with the Italian marble producer Bloc Studios, and thanks to the duo's superior art directing skills, it came complete with the perfectly styled set of images you'll see after the jump.

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04.20.15

Sighted

Aelfie x Studio Proba Rugs

For the rest of this week, we'll be bombarding you with our favorite finds from last week's Milan furniture fair, but we'd be remiss if we didn't first highlight one of the best things to recently launch on our shores: A colorfully graphic series of limited-edition rugs, pillows, and prints that represent a powerhouse collaboration between two Brooklyn designers, Alex Proba of A Poster a Day, and rug designer Aelfie Oudghiri. The two designers have strangely similar backgrounds — both attended medical school in Europe before finding their way to Brooklyn's collaborative design community — as well as a complementary aesthetic that's heavy on geometry and asymmetry.

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04.18.15

Saturday Selects

Week of April 13, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: While the international design community (including Jill and Monica) convened in Milan for the Salone del Mobile, we put Ryland on the case to round up a few of his favorite finds, ranging from the dark, moody objects of Blackman Cruz at Wright (pictured above) to a Technicolor Instagram account involving pool noodles and sneakers.

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04.13.15

8 Things

Los Angeles Ceramicist Ben Medansky

Anyone familiar with the work of Los Angeles ceramicist Ben Medansky would be surprised to learn that, when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, his work was actually colorful, spanning the full spectrum of glaze hues. But after he graduated and went to work for a succession of other artists — among them the Haas brothers, who hired him to set up and run their in-house ceramics shop, and Peter Shire, for whom he spent a sweaty summer splatter-painting dishware — he decided he needed to find his own signature style, so he abandoned color entirely upon setting up his own studio in 2012 and started by focusing exclusively on form. The strong, graphic shapes he’s been creating since, all in earthy orange stoneware peeking out from under a speckled-white glaze, have become instantly recognizable in the contemporary ceramics scene.

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09.13.13

Sighted

Book/Shop on Remodelista

Like so many amazing creative people and endeavors these days, we were first introduced to Erik Haywood's Book/Shop project through Instagram, where we fell for his beautiful plywood book stand, and where his fans include SU besties Wary Meyers and Mondo Blogo. So we were excited to see gorgeous pictures of his brick and mortar store in California pop up on Remodelista yesterday, following an interview they did with him back in January which we somehow missed. In the new post, Haywood explains his M.O.: "We are not a bookstore, that's not really what we're doing. We're here to encourage people to go to bookstores, visit libraries, and live with books. Now, with the internet, what's the point of going to a bookstore when you have a specific title in mind?" As Remodelista's Alexa Holz points out in the piece, Book/Shop's selection of vintage and rare books is meant "to expose you to something you didn't actually have in mind," she writes.

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04.11.15

Saturday Selects

Week of April 6, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week brought a bounty of our favorite things: oxidized metal, iridescent leather, lenticulars, mini-sized fruit and furniture, and a special appearance by a Bucky Fuller–inspired Jell-O mold.

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04.10.15

Sighted

These New Copper Vessels Will Make Your Houseplants Unkillable

Ask anyone what kind of houseplant you ought to get if you're cursed with a black thumb, and you're nearly always regaled with tales of the wonderful, unkillable qualities of cacti and succulents. But frankly, we've had bad luck with more than a few of that breed. Été Studios, a new product-design studio based in Seoul, Korea, is here to help. Their first line of products consists of a series of vases and pots specially designed to make growing cacti and succulents easier. Larger vessels are made from copper, a material known for its antimicrobial properties that inhibit bacterial growth, and smaller, hydroponic vases are made from two parts.

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04.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ben Peterson’s “Nebraska”

On this site, we don't tend to feature exhibitions once they've already closed, but this one retains one of the most incredible visual archives we've seen to date, a record of objects that were as beautifully displayed as they were constructed. Ben Peterson's "Nebraska," which was on view at San Francisco's Ratio 3 gallery from January 17 to February 28, featured a series of architectural ceramic sculptures by the Oakland-based artist, painted in different, natural hues to erase traces of their clay past and to resemble something more like weathered and patinated concrete. Almost Brutalist in form, the sculptures were installed on site-specific pastel plinths, an extreme juxtaposition that somehow seemed just right.

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04.07.15

Eye Candy

Forma Anticum

Part of the joy we take in creating content for Sight Unseen every day is the delight we get from telling the stories behind the makers and the images we publish. But what happens when there is literally no story to be found? That's exactly the position we found ourselves in the other day when we stumbled across these images on Pinterest.

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04.06.15

At Home With

Brook & Lyn, Los Angeles Furniture Designers

The precision-machined brass bars lining the base of Mimi Jung and Brian Hurewitz’s Pepto-pink sofa? They’re a doggie jail. At least they were, conceptually speaking, intended to be; the couple lives with three dogs in Los Angeles’s Mt. Washington neighborhood, and Truffle, the most diminutive of the bunch, necessitated the arrangement. “If you give her six inches of space underneath anything, she’ll steal things from around the house and drag them in there,” says Jung. “I wanted to make a couch that had prison bars for her, so she couldn’t get in.” Granted Jung started out sketching metal poles and wound up creating a system of stunning, diagonally canted fins that subtly shift in appearance depending on one’s vantage point, but the sofa overall was — like much of Brook & Lyn’s work — designed to serve very specific, very personal needs. Since they moved from Brooklyn to L.A. a year and a half ago, Jung and Hurewitz have been populating the studio's portfolio with pieces they’ve created for themselves, and their new home.

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04.04.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 30, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about designers doing mesmerizing things with very simple shapes: from Nendo's new color-gradient cube tables to a series of interactive geometric projections to the London grad who's pushing the boundaries of jewelry with his mixed-material compositions (pictured).

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04.03.15

Eye Candy

Lauren Clay, Artist

Artist Lauren Clay has a background in painting and printmaking, but her work is hardly confined to the two-dimensional plane. Her body of work began as a series of large paintings on paper. But as she progressed, she became more and more interested in the inherent tendencies of paper to curl away from the wall, and she began to explore the third dimension, bridging the gap between painting and sculpture. We can see this in her delicate cut-out grids on marbled acrylic paper, which naturally curl away from the wall, creating a presence in the viewer's space and a dialogue between paper and wall, paper and viewer, and 2D vs. 3D.

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