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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Mast Brothers Creative Director Nathan Warkentin

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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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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At London’s Frieze Art Fair

Which furniture designs do discerning art dealers truly prefer? Not to sell, but to sit in? That was the age-old question that photographer Sanna Helena Berger set out to answer while traversing the aisles of last month's Frieze Art Fair. Her utterly unscientific answer? Four out of five discerning art dealers prefer Friso Kramer, or failing that, some variation on mid-century bentwood. Quelle surprise. A Swedish photographer based in London, Berger chose to hone in on the subject after her maiden voyage to Frieze — tagging along with a friend's art class — proved otherwise underwhelming. “The space itself is divided into cubicles, very much like an overcrowded office, except that everything is crisp, bright, and white and within the cubicles the office wear is of a higher standard,” she explains. “Obviously I don’t claim that there was no worthwhile art there, because there certainly was, but the environment, the space, and the curation were not for me.” Instead of complaining, though, and jeopardizing her friend’s happy experience, Berger pulled out her camera and devoted the rest of the day to documenting art-booth furniture. Then she decided to share the results with usThen she decided to share the results with us, in a behind-the-scenes exposé that will no doubt put a lot of curious minds at ease, once and for all.
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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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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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SARKOS' hand-painted wallpaper

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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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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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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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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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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