06.26.15

Shopping

Top 5: Transparent Jewelry

A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, the subject is transparent jewelry, which has evolved beyond its '60s pop connotations to encompass designs both subtle and edgy.
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06.25.15

Up and Coming

Justin Hunt Sloane, Artist

It can be hard to pin down exactly what it is Brooklyn-based artist and designer Justin Hunt Sloane actually does. He graduated with a BFA in printmaking and interactive design from Art Center, but while there, he became interested in the school's famed automotive program and began dabbling in classes like rapid prototyping and fabrication technology. Since moving to New York, he's held day jobs as a website designer for Creative Time, or, currently, senior designer at the branding agency Wolff Olins, but in his freelance work and spare time, he makes everything from drawings to etchings to self-published books to album covers to sculptures.
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06.24.15

Up and Coming

Nina Cho, Furniture Designer

“One of the most important ideas in traditional Korean architecture and art is the aesthetic of emptiness — practicing the beauty of the void,” Nina Cho explains to me over the phone from her studio in Detroit, where she recently set up camp after graduating from Cranbrook. “In painting, the unpainted portion is as important as the portion that was painted; it’s about respecting the emptiness as much as the object.” Cho should know; she was born in the States but grew up in Seoul, and as a child she would often visit traditional Korean architecture sites. But little did she know the impact those visits would have on her future career.
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06.22.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Slowly by Sam Moyer at Galerie Rodolphe Jansen

While the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sam Moyer has played around with fabric painted to look like marble in the past, the geometric panels suspended in gorgeous bronze armatures that she recently installed at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels are, in fact, the real deal. Meant to interact with the space's striking ceilings and the summer light that filters through them, the slabs are cut so thin as to be almost semi-translucent, a subverting of expectations about the way certain materials are supposed to look, feel, and function — a common theme in Moyer's work, and one that will sound familiar to many designers, which is probably why we've found ourselves so drawn to her.
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06.20.15

Saturday Selects

Week of June 15, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we survey the sudden trend of gymnasium-inspired designs, the best of Design Miami/Basel, and a few of our favorite works by photographer Suzanne Mooney, pictured above. Plus: the weirdest design-world video we've ever, ever seen, featuring Chen Chen, Katrina Vonnegut, and a cat driving a dumptruck.
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10.01.13

Sighted

ALL Knitwear Fall Update, featuring RO/LU

We never imagined we'd be the website bringing you images from a fashion brand's lookbook, but the ones we're featuring today were just too perfect to ignore. To launch her fall ALL Knitwear collection — which includes crewnecks and pompom hats in new geometry-inflected patterns and color combos — Sight Unseen fave Annie Larson reached out to another studio with a happily low-tech approach: the Minneapolis-based furniture duo ROLU. It's a serious match made in heaven, as these photos — shot by Mary C. Manning at Mondo Cane in New York — can attest. Both Larson and ROLU make deceptively simple-looking work that belies serious craftsmanship; both studios have Midwestern roots (Larson grew up in Wisconsin and used to work at Target HQ in Minneapolis.) But it also makes perfect sense on another level. ROLU often speak about their affinity for theatrical sets, so though their work is normally shown on a gallery level, we can't imagine a better context than this in which to show it.
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06.18.15

Sighted

Subtle, Pastel Paintings Inspired by the Tokyo Metro

Growing up in Wisconsin, artist Trek Matthews was initially inspired by his natural surroundings, incorporating wildlife scenes and Native American mythologies into his illustrations. But following a move to Atlanta and a short stint in Japan in 2014, his artistic style began maturing into what we see today.
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06.17.15

Sighted

Designers Interpret the Classic Tolix A Chair

We aren't quite sure how we missed this project — considering both our affinity for the classic Tolix A chair (we might own seven (!) of them ourselves) and our affection for the designers involved — but in Milan last month, the French company celebrated its 80th anniversary and in doing so invited eight design studios to reinterpret its most famous offering.
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06.16.15

Studio Visit

Portland Textile Artist Kayla Mattes

Kayla Mattes’ tapestries are an antidote to the disconnection and depersonalization that spending hours online can sometimes leave you feeling. Her work is plugged in to all the technology we take for granted but she recontextualizes it, slows it down, and the effect is immersive, dizzying, a little chaotic, and oddly comforting.
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06.15.15

Up and Coming

Italian Product Designer Giorgia Zanellato

About six or seven years ago, when Jill and I were still editors at the late, great I.D. magazine, we had a gut feeling that something was happening in Italian design. For years its reputation had been seemingly stuck in the '80s — no one ever, ever talked about its contemporary scene — and yet suddenly we were seeing a few young talents pop up here and there. We commissioned a story on the subject, but despite our prescience (as evidenced in part by the subsequent head-spinning rise of Luca Nichetto), we missed something seriously major: Fabrica. Neither of us realized the impact its residency program and Sam Baron–led design studio would have in nurturing Italy's brightest new voices, from Matteo Cibic to Matteo Zorzenoni to today's subject, Giorgia Zanellato.
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06.13.15

Saturday Selects

Week of June 8, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a look inside Andreas Murkudis's new full-service design outpost in Berlin, a sneak peek at our favorite projects launching at Design Miami/Basel next week, and our first picks from this year's degree shows, starting with the vanity above.
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06.12.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

ECAL Takes Over Apartment 50 in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City

Since it was renovated in the early 2000s and restored to its original 1952 condition, Apartment 50 in Le Corbusier's famous Cité Radieuse housing complex in Marseilles, France, has played host to a rotating cast of designers — Jasper Morrison in 2008 followed by the Bouroullecs, Konstantin Grcic, and, perhaps most successfully, Pierre Charpin. But a group of Swiss design students may have just completed our favorite intervention yet.
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06.11.15

Sighted

Wintercheck Factory’s Collection No. 300

When we asked Brooklyn's Wintercheck Factory — who debuted their latest collection with us at Sight Unseen OFFSITE last month — to shoot those new pieces in the most appropriate scenario they could imagine for our Self Portrait column, their choice of venues ended up being even more fitting than they themselves realized. A 1910 bank building in Bed-Stuy is about to become the duo's new studio, and clearly it makes for a stunning backdrop, but having been ripped up, painted, retiled, left to rot, bricked up, and, now, appropriated as a creative space, it can also be read as a symbol of Wintercheck Factory's own gradual reinvention.
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