09.08.15
Sighted
Stas Volovik, Painter
Born in Uzbekistan and now living in Berlin, Volovik didn’t pursue any formal artistic training but rather taught himself the principles of abstraction.
09.05.15
Saturday Selects
Week of August 31, 2015
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, we're keeping it short so we can enjoy the last gasp of summer this holiday weekend, sharing just a few discoveries like the colorful anthropomorphic ceramics of Branden Huntley and a new marble-faced watch by AARK and Daniel Emma. See you at the beach!
09.04.15
Up and Coming
Tunisia Furniture Studio Marlo & Isaure
When we discovered the design duo Marlo & Isaure — founded by former ECAL classmates Marlo Kara (Swiss-Greek, born in Geneva) and Isaure Bouyssonie (French, born in Tunisia) — we assumed they were simply a furniture studio, creating products like the Fabrique lights, pictured above, for galleries and manufacturers. But it turns out that assumption was only half correct.
09.03.15
Shopping
Top 5: Bookends
A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, our subject is the bookend — a.k.a. five new ways to make your killer design library look even cooler.
09.02.15
Up and Coming
Melbourne Artist Matthew Dettmer
Melbourne-based Matthew Dettmer's work spans painting and sculpture, but in Dettmer's hands, those practices become relatively indistinct from one another. "During art school, I was painting photos and images that I'd found. But there was no reason the outcome needed to be a painting when it could just exist as a photo. So I started making sculptures of found objects or forms that didn’t exist — ones that I wished did."
09.27.12
Sighted
Isabel Wilson on Freunde Von Freunden
There must have been something in the air back in 2009, because Freunde Von Freunden, the Berlin-based website whose voyeuristic, photography-based interviews are of a piece with our own obsessions (i.e. barging in on people's home and workplaces and showing ourselves around) — started just a few weeks before Sight Unseen's launch at the end of that year. "We never look for apartments but for people," they say, and that's always been our mission as well — to get at the personality behind the product, and the narrative behind each new release. To that end, since we introduced you last week to Isabel Wilson's textile and jewelry line with Chen Chen — and considering we've more than covered her partner in crime — we figured it was high time to get to know the RISD grad's incredible,intricate work. Luckily FvF beat us to it, with a gorgeously photographed editorial by photographer Brian Ferry, which appeared on the site just last month, and which we're excerpting on Sight Unseen today.
09.01.15
Invitation
Views by Designer Tom Hancocks
In his new Views series created exclusively for Sight Unseen, New York designer Tom Hancocks used the 3-D graphics software Blender to conjure six different rooms inhabited by various types of chairs, whose forms and relationships to their immediate surroundings were intended to convey certain moods and emotions.
08.31.15
Sighted
Baskets and Jewelry by Philadelphia’s Karen Gayle Tinney
For us, Karen Gayle Tinney was one of those surprises that you're shocked to find lurking in your own backyard — the artist and designer lives in Philadelphia, where for the past year she's been making elaborate woven baskets, planters, and necklaces for stores like Vagabond and Brooklyn's People of 2morrow.
08.29.15
Saturday Selects
Week of August 24, 2015
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: fall previews from NYABF and Maison et Objet, a new place to score succulents in Scandinavia, and a serious showing of Aussie design power, including a new collection from Melbourne furniture-maker Fred Ganim, above.
08.28.15
Studio Visit
Dee Clements of Chicago’s Herron Studio
For Dee Clements, who makes beautiful hand-woven goods out of her Chicago design studio, Herron, sustainability is key. “I know it’s an overused buzzword, but it’s really important,” she says. Though she’s talking about the environmental impact of large-scale textile production and why she mainly uses small-farm fibers that aren’t chemically or unethically produced, sustainability, in a creative sense, is also on her mind.
08.28.15
Sighted
Wonderplants Prints by Sarah Illenberger
Berlin illustrator and photographer Sarah Illenberger turned her recent six-week trip to Porto, Portugal, into an extended personal art project, collecting leaves from local botanical gardens and then decorating and photographing them for her new Wonderplants series.
08.27.15
Sighted
BZIPPY, Kathryn Bentley, and Waka Waka at L.A.’s Dream Collective
We've seen creatives collaborate in plenty of novel, inventive ways — by mailing materials back and forth, by playing games of exquisite corpse. But sometimes the best joint projects arise more loosely, like the one currently on view at Dream Collective in Los Angeles, featuring work by Bari Ziperstein, Waka Waka, and store owner/jewelry designer Kathryn Bentley.
08.26.15
Excerpt: Magazine
The Spectrum Issue of Gather Journal
Since its launch in 2012, each issue of the biannual food journal Gather has been organized around a theme, but this summer's is by far our favorite. We're excerpting a story from “Spectrum,” an entire issue devoted to color.