10.10.15

Saturday Selects

Week of October 5, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. In this week's post: Peek at Chamber gallery's newest collection, own an Andrew Kuo artwork for $35, drool over new jewelry by Mociun, and mentally transport yourself to a mind-bending installation in Amsterdam, pictured above.

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10.09.15

Graphic Design

Block Print Series by Naomi Clark for Fort Makers

With their repeating triangle and half-moon motifs, the prints represent a natural synthesis of the collective's output to date.

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10.08.15

8 Things

The Influences of Mast Brothers Creative Director Nathan Warkentin

Nathan Warkentin has been driving Mast Brothers's creative direction for the past three years, nudging it away from its original Brooklyn aesthetic and towards something more relevant. “In the beginning everything was a little old-timey, with a lot of classic or nautical patterns,” says Warkentin, whose influences we’re profiling today. “I started looking for inspiration in interesting art and architecture movements, and the work of current textile and pattern designers, to make it feel more contemporary.”

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10.07.15

Sighted

New Ceramics By Saint Karen

Many ceramicists have day jobs, but few have ones as incongruous as Karen Aragon of Saint Karen, who spends the majority of her hours working as a web developer. Her latest ceramics collection is an attempt to bridge those two interests by pulling influences from her more technical role into her creative one. “I wanted to be able to marry these two parts of my life, so I fed what I learn and research as a developer into my ceramic designs," she explains.

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10.05.15

Studio Visit

Los Angeles Textile Artist Rachel Duvall

Since moving to Los Angeles five years ago, the artist Rachel Duvall has been refining an almost scientific approach to handweaving, based as much in foundational considerations like hue and line as in methodical chemical experimentation. She uses only natural dyes and modifiers such as copper and iron to “investigate the subtlety of colors,” she says, though the range she achieves — including a bright neon yellow and purple from fermented lichen she collects herself and then brews in her backyard — is striking.

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11.07.12

Sighted

Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms at the Guggenheim

It may look like a staging area for the production of Stuart Haygarth chandeliers or Massimiliano Adami cabinets, or possibly an excerpt from the website Things Organized Neatly. But the comely technicolor garbage pile pictured above is actually a piece by the Mexican art-star Gabriel Orozco, who's known for his use of humble materials and found objects, and it's moving into New York's Guggenheim museum as of this Friday. Asterisms is a process-oriented installation — our favorite kind! — featuring thousands of objects Orozco collected from two separate sites: a sports field near his New York home and a wildlife reserve on the coast of Baja California Sur, the latter of which happens to enjoy a constant flow of industrial backwash from across the Pacific that every so often yields bits of aesthetically pleasing detritus.

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10.02.15

Sighted

OTTO Objects by Roula Nassar

Nassar runs the Brooklyn studio OTTO, through which the erstwhile fashion student and ever-curious autodidact became known primarily for her art books and artisanal knitwear — the items that caught our eye back when we first featured her last February — before turning her hand to the vessels featured here, partly because of their appeal as a consummate blank canvas.

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09.30.15

Up and Coming

SARKOS, a Brooklyn Wallpaper Company

One of the primary objectives of Sight Unseen OFFSITE has always been to feature up-and-coming designers who are experimenting with materials and processes in interesting, and often very personal, ways. So we were delighted earlier this year to welcome Stephanie Dedes Reimers’s just-launched wallpaper company SARKOS to our line-up. SARKOS — whose name translates from an Ancient Greek word for the tactile sense of our earthly spirit — mixes deeply personal inspiration with fine art, hand-painting techniques, creating a line of papers that are muted and highly individual.

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09.29.15

Fair Report

At the 2015 London Design Festival

In terms of sheer distance traversed, if not content, LDF now stands nearly on par with the Milan fair. But these days it’s also becoming equally vital as a destination for open design debate, with a strong manufacturing voice represented and a buffet of ambitious installations on offer. Guide in hand, we hit the mean – but thankfully sunny – streets of London to choose our favorites from this year’s show.

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09.28.15

Q+A

Laura Houseley on Ready Made Go at the London Design Festival

Last week's London Design Festival included plenty of beautiful objects thoughtfully displayed on pedestals or on gallery walls. But possibly even more compelling was the setup at the Ace Hotel's Ready Made Go exhibition, curated by Laura Houseley of Modern Design Review magazine, where visitors could experience a handful of new designs by local up-and-comers actually put to work in their intended habitat.

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09.26.15

Saturday Selects

Week of September 20, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Photographs that make us scratch our heads (like the one above by photographer/architect Erin O'Keefe), a colorful Baggu x New Friends collab, and a bunch of fall art exhibitions.

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09.25.15

Shopping

Top 5: Mobiles

A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, we're turning our attention to a perennial favorite subject: mobiles! (And for those in small spaces, don't worry — these beauties will look as good hanging against a wall as they do in mid-air.)

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09.24.15

Q+A

David Haskell on His Psychotic Plants Show at Coming Soon

New York-based editor and Kings County Distillery co-founder David Haskell has been collecting cacti and other succulents in his spare time for the past decade, and he’s also spent his Tuesday nights over the last two years cultivating his skills as a budding ceramicist. In search of the perfect pots for his handpicked plants, Haskell linked his two passions, the results of which are on view at “Psychotic Plants,” opening tonight at Coming Soon.

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