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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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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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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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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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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Mel Nguyen’s Desktop Deposits Series

Earlier today we posted a studio visit with the young Minneapolis artist Mel Nguyen, shot by photographer Debbie Carlos. But it only featured a small selection of Nguyen's work, in which each project is typically disassembled and morphed into three more. "If you look at a single project of mine and only associate me with that project, it will be not a complete representation of my practice," Nguyen says. We figured it was worth showing you one more example from her portfolio: her recent clay Desktop Deposits series, made for the Kansas City, Missouri, project Objet Boutique curated by Dean Roper.
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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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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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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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."
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