06.03.15

Travel

Andy Rementer & Margherita Urbani in Tokyo

We here at Sight Unseen consider ourselves to be relatively worldly — I say this literally as Monica touches down in Norway — but if there's one place that's proved a holy grail for the both of us, it's Japan. We've never had the opportunity nor the funds to go, despite being relatively obsessed with the idea of both shopping and scouting there. So when two of our most visually attuned friends offered to provide us with a diary of sorts during their recent trip there, we jumped at the chance: Philadelphia-based partners-in-crime Andy Rementer and Margherita Urbani (whom many of you likely know from their collaborations in Apartamento magazine) were recently in Tokyo for two weeks.
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06.01.15

Up and Coming

Branden M. Collins, art director

For those of you who follow our website religiously, the name Branden M. Collins may ring a few bells: You may remember his poppy, brushstroke patterns for our Sight Unseen x Print All Over Me collab at the Standard Shop during Art Basel Design Miami last December. Or maybe you recall seeing his black-and-white zig-zag vases at our recent pop-up Think Big! at Space 15 Twenty in Los Angeles. Collins — who along with Madeline Moore operates as the San Francisco–based multi-disciplinary duo The Young Never Sleep — is more than just a graphic designer though. He’s also an art director, stylist, illustrator, photographer, product and costume designer, and serial collaborator.
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05.30.15

Saturday Selects

Week of May 25, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a hip summer pop-up shop in Sagaponack, two ceramicists branching out into wallpaper and shelf brackets, and more work you might have missed during ICFF, like the Earnest Studio trivets above.
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05.29.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Curse The Darkness by The American Design Club With Roll & Hill

When the American Design Club first started back in 2008, the idea was to find new ways to gain exposure for emerging talents in the U.S. scene, a goal pursued primarily via juried exhibitions — and a goal that happened to dovetail perfectly with Sight Unseen's vision for a New York design week event that would put the spotlight on exactly the kind of emerging voices the AmDC comprised. In 2011, the second year of our Noho Design District show (the precursor to Sight Unseen OFFSITE), we hosted the club's fifth exhibition, and last month we were thrilled to host its 12th. Called "Curse the Darkness" and presented in partnership with the lighting brand Roll & Hill, the show invited designers to submit "objects that can hold a candle and light up a room."
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05.27.15

Studio Visit

Giselle Hicks in Helena, Montana

Once upon a time, it was nearly impossible to have a creative career without immersing yourself in the artistic community of a large metropolitan area. But with the ease and connectivity that comes with living in the golden age of the Internet, it’s become more and more common to see people working in places most would consider more than a bit off the beaten path. Take ceramicist Giselle Hicks: In 2011, after completing an artist-in-residency program at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, Hicks relocated to Philadelphia for a six-month stint and found that she wasn’t cut out to live the big city lifestyle. “The city felt like an obstacle course. It overwhelmed me. I felt like I was just keeping my head above the water," she remembers. "I longed for the big sky, open spaces, and the beauty and ease of life in Montana. I love the culture and diversity and opportunities a big city has to offer, but in my daily life and studio practice I need quiet and lots of space to grow and evolve."
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05.05.14

Sighted

Project No. 8’s New Website

For years, fans of the New York concept shop Project No. 8 have been begging its founders, Brian Janusiak and Elizabeth Beer, to expand beyond their LES flagship and Ace Hotel annex and open more stores. But the pair have consistently refused, because they knew all along exactly where their next location needed to be: online. Their original website launched in 2006, but they'd recently grown so frustrated with its outdated design that they'd stopped updating it all together; this weekend, they quietly launched projectno8.com 2.0, a brand new site that's truer to their current inventory and that effectively leapfrogs them over eight years of e-commerce evolution. Greeting visitors to the homepage is a slideshow of still-life images by New York photographer Clemens Kois, who met Janusiak when the pair collaborated on Carl Aubock: The Workshop — we asked each of them to tell us a little bit more about the project.
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05.26.15

Interiors

Piet Hein Eek’s Wonder Room at The Future Perfect

In case you missed it, on Saturday we recapped our favorite offerings from around town during NYCxDesign. But there was one location whose showcase we saved for its own story: The Future Perfect, where owner Dave Alhadeff has given over the entire Noho shop to Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek until mid-June.
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05.23.15

Saturday Selects

Week of May 18, 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 bringing you a special ICFF edition, with our favorite finds from elsewhere around town (in other words, all the things we would have seen in person if we hadn't been tending to our own event!)
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05.22.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Tour of the 2015 Show: Part II

...In which we show you the rest of the incredible work we presented this year at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which took place at Hudson Mercantile and featured the work of more than 100 designers, who hailed from places as varied as Los Angeles, Vancouver, Indianapolis, St. Augustine, FL, Detroit, Seattle, Montreal, and, of course, Brooklyn. If you happened to miss it — or if you just want to relive the glory — check out our slideshow after the jump, which features all of the studios that exhibited on the 6th floor of our show.
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05.22.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Tour of the 2015 Show: Part I

As anyone who's ever made an album knows, sophomore efforts are by far the toughest to pull off. And so, even though we here at Sight Unseen have been putting together a major Design Week showcase in some way or another since 2010, this year marked only our second outing as Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which debuted last year to enormous fanfare and praise.
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05.20.15

Fair Report

At the 2015 Collective Design Fair

Comprising four days, 12,000 square feet, and 50-something exhibitors, Sight Unseen OFFSITE is a major undertaking — a Herculean one, in fact, if you consider that there are only two of us leading the entire operation. So when we announced in April that we were doing an additional show this year, at the Collective Design fair, people quite understandably looked at us like we'd lost our minds. And yet we persisted on the sheer force of our belief that Steven Learner and his team at Collective are doing great things for design, things we wanted to be a part of — not just providing a platform for some of the world's most important design galleries to sell to clients, but attempting to widen the dialogue with special projects like (this year) on-site design performances by The American Design Club, a Nap Lab by Various Projects and Print All Over Me, installations by OS & OOS and Jonathan Nesci, and of course, an offer to let us curate a corollary to Sight Unseen OFFSITE that featured six up-and-coming American designers making gallery-level work. If you didn't get the chance to see last week's Collective Design fair, which welcomed more than 10,000 visitors, here's our best of show — and stay tuned for images from our own presentation at Collective, which we'll be posting tomorrow.
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05.19.15

Sight Unseen Presents

Print All Over Me HOME

Sight Unseen is the exclusive curator of the new PAOM HOME line, where our job is to help choose what kinds of objects to feature and then to invite up-and-coming illustrators, artists, and designers to contribute prints to those items. For the inaugural collection — which features IKEA slipcovers, plant cozies, pillows, linen throws, beanbags, cushions, and more — we selected four powerhouse female design studios: Caitlin Mociun, Pia Howell, Studiopepe, and Alex Proba. Get a 20% off discount code after the jump!
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05.15.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

The Making of the Principals’ Dynamic Sanctuary for Ford

Sight Unseen OFFSITE opens today, and front and center at this year's show is an undulating structure that, from a distance, looks incredibly mysterious — its walls are made from an unusual material, and they periodically emit a strange, pulsing blue glow. As you approach the structure, you first pass through a very narrow entryway that obscures your view of what's inside, but once you arrive there — well, that's the magic of the Dynamic Sanctuary, an installation by the Brooklyn design studio The Principals that's a kind of poetic metaphor for the design ideas behind Ford's 2015 Edge vehicle.
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