09.18.15

Q+A

Jim Walrod on His “Difficult” Exhibition at R & Company

It’s not news that certain works by designers such as Ray and Charles Eames, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, or Ettore Sottsass deserve a place on a podium. That their initial reception was shock, outrage, and even utter disgust, then, may come as a surprise — that’s the premise explored in “Difficult,” a new exhibition at New York gallery R & Company curated by interior designer Jim Walrod.
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09.17.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

James Hyde’s Varieties of Useful Experience at Volume Gallery

He just opened a sprawling solo show at the Chicago design gallery Volume, but if you're not familiar with the work of James Hyde — or at least not to the degree of other Volume alums like Jonathan Nesci, Tanya Aguiñiga, or Stephen Burks — you're not alone. And in fact, that's kind of the point: Hyde, who began his career in New York in the '70s, is a painter, and even when his works take the form of sofas or lamps, they remain squarely in the realm of art.
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Antiquing in Hudson
09.16.15

An Afternoon With

Patrick Parrish and Alex Gilbert, Antiquing in Hudson

On a recent blazing-hot Saturday afternoon, we joined Artsy's Alex Gilbert and gallerist Patrick Parrish on an antiquing trip along Warren Street in Hudson, New York, documenting all the objects and furnishings that managed to stop the couple in their tracks, which — considering their level of expertise — is no easy feat. See their favorite finds after the jump.
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09.15.15

Graphic Design

Peter Judson’s April Showers

If illustration doesn't work out for Peter Judson, perhaps he might consider interior design as an alternate career? In the story we published on the London designer today, he revealed that for every day in April of this year, he imagined and drew a different shower stall, complete with tile schemes, hinges, Bacterio-style laminates, and geometric faucets.
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05.16.14

Invitation

Print All Over Me x Sight Unseen

Back in December, we embarked on an experimental curatorial collaboration with Print All Over Me, the amazing print-your-own-pattern service, founded by fashion designer Jesse Finkelstein and his sister, Meredith, that allows designers to upload any graphic they please onto fashionable white blanks — sweatshirts, bomber jackets, shift dresses, backpacks, leggings, and more. The project — for which we hand-selected illustrators like Will Bryant, Tim Colmant, and Clay Hickson — was such a rousing success that Jesse approached us for round two a few months ago. We were already 100 percent sold on the idea, thinking we could sell the results at a pop-up at our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event — which opens today at noon! — when Jesse casually emailed this bomb: "Hey! Let's also talk about print all over furniture!"
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09.14.15

8 Things

From Ode To Things

Ode to Things stocks a tightly edited selection of water glasses, trivets, utility hooks, and notepads that share a common, stripped-down design language and are, above all, eminently useful. We picked our eight favorites.
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09.12.15

Saturday Selects

Week of September 7, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: From the geometric works of Frank Stella to the bulbous ceramics of Ron Nagle (pictured above), this week was filled to the brim with amazing exhibitions — fall show season is definitely here!
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09.11.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Thaddeus Wolfe at R & Company

Thaddeus Wolfe's latest experiments are on view now at a solo show at R & Company in Tribeca, and we're including some of our favorite pieces here today. Inspired by everything from the deterioration of urban surfaces in his Brooklyn neighborhood to the vicissitudes of mushroom foraging, each piece goes so far beyond any preconceived notions of glasswork that it becomes something else entirely.
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09.10.15

Up and Coming

Chicago Artist Trek Matthews

If you’re a dedicated Sight Unseen reader, the name Trek Matthews may ring a bell since we featured his work just a few months ago — paintings of pastel-colored shapes, intersecting and receding into the distance, that were inspired by transit stations and the directional signage of Asia. This time we’re delving a little deeper into his inspiration and process as part of our series featuring the work of four artists who were commissioned to create large-scale installations at Dolby’s new headquarters in San Francisco.
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09.10.15

Up and Coming

Portland Artist Drew Tyndell

Portland-based Drew Tyndell is the creative director of his own studio, Computer Team, which specializes in 2D hand-drawn and stop-motion animations. But he’s also an accomplished artist in the more traditional sense of the word, and his most recent project is a commissioned mural for Dolby’s new headquarters in San Francisco.
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09.09.15

Up and Coming

Atlanta Artist Christopher Derek Bruno

The art of Atlanta's Christopher Derek Bruno — which hews mostly toward rainbow lenticular wall sculptures that change color and form depending on the vantage point of the viewer, like the piece above he recently installed in Dolby's San Francisco headquarters — has almost as much movement and dimension and physicality as his furniture.
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09.09.15

Up and Coming

Atlanta Artist Kevin Byrd

Dazzle camouflage was a frenetic patterning applied to ships during World War I to scramble the depth perception of enemies — not exactly a motif you'd expect to see applied to the walls of a major corporate office. Yet inside the new San Francisco headquarters for Dolby, Atlanta painter and dazzle enthusiast Kevin Byrd was given carte blanche to do just that.
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