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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05.13.15

The Making of

Chris Wolston’s Fetish Lights

One of the many great things about living in this post-Postmodern, cyber-gray area of the 2k10s, is that artists and designers can draw inspiration from pretty much any culture or period and come away with something new and exciting. There's the brightly colored, geometric, “playful” route that has become so popular with today’s makers — and then there’s Brooklyn’s Chris Wolston. His approach to making is often from a primordial or primitive perspective, where senses of the handmade and the human spirit are easily discernable.
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12.13.12

Sighted

Merijn Hos at Beginnings Gallery

Could New York’s best new gallery be in Greenpoint, Brooklyn? We’re beginning — no pun intended — to think it just might be so. Beginnings, a small storefront gallery on a side street off Greenpoint’s main drag, opened earlier this fall, the brainchild of seven like-minded friends and artists (two of whom are erstwhile members of Philadelphia’s artists-for-artists gallery Space 1026). At the outset, the goal was to create a warm, welcoming space that would be a home for emerging artists but also a place where even first-time art buyers might be encouraged to actually make a purchase. In their inaugural exhibition, the curators asked questions like: “What’s art for anymore? How can contemporary art be bought and sold in a healthy, progressive way? How can new artists support/be supported in their community? In the 21st century, what are the most satisfying and effective roles of the gallery? The gallerist? The gallery-goers?” The refreshingly honest answer? “We got no idea, but we’re happy to present this art and these artists.”
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05.12.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Designing for The New Escapism

Months ago, when we first began chatting with Ford about what a partnership for our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event this weekend would look like, we alighted on a phrase Ford had used to talk about the spirit that their new Ford Edge vehicle embodies: They called it the new escapism, which involves designing pockets of personal space that might help to bring a sense of calm and balance to everyday life’s otherwise volatile pace. From that nugget evolved a framework for both the Dynamic Sanctuary installation we commissioned from The Principals (above) — which uses light to visualize users’ biorhythms, creating a calming oasis during the hectic schedule of New York design week — and the programming we’ve created surrounding it.
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05.11.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Preview the 2015 Show!

In March we broke the news about our second annual New York design week exhibition, Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which is free and open to the public and takes place this year at Hudson Mercantile, 500 W. 36th St. at 10th Ave., from May 15 to 18. But today we're giving you an official preview of the show, which this year encompasses nearly 100 brands, designers, and studios creating everything from furniture to a photo booth to an immersive living room installation to a vegan-friendly daily lunch cafe.
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05.09.15

Saturday Selects

Week of May 4, 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 some amazing recent design-art by the likes of Scott Burton and Nick Van Woert (pictured above), then cast our gaze forward instead of back, previewing some of the furniture and accessories set to launch during New York design week from folks like Matter and Umbra Shift.
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05.08.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sabine Marcelis at Etage Projects

Copenhagen's Etage Projects is one of the newer galleries on the scene, but it's fast becoming one of our picks for the best. In the past two years, exhibition subjects have included SU favorites like Fredrik Paulsen, Jo Nagasaka, and Eva Berendes; the show currently on view includes Dutch designers Luuk van den Broek (who we're working on a much larger story on!) and Sabine Marcelis, who with Brit Van Nerven is responsible for one of our favorite pieces of design from the past year. Marcelis's newest project, called Voie Lights, is the first in a series of two investigations into the manipulation of light paths.
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Camilla Low geometric sculptures
05.07.15

Q+A

Oslo’s Camilla Løw on Her Graphic, Geometric Sculptures

There's this thing we do constantly at Sight Unseen that we don't even realize we're doing: We gravitate towards creatives who work in other disciplines, like art or fashion, only to find out they've either gone to school for or been massively inspired by design. Upon visiting, last June, the Oslo studio of sculptor Camilla Løw, whose work we'd seen on a few Tumblrs and fallen for, we quickly learned that she, too, fell into the latter camp — although she studied fine art, she spoke to us about architecture and her dreams of someday designing furniture, and showed us her prized books on Bauhaus jewelry and the work of Andrea Branzi. Some of her own pieces even function as vases or stools. But make no mistake, she is an artist, one who's shown at galleries like Jack Hanley and Andrew Kreps, fairs like Frieze, and museums like the Astrup Fearnley. Read on to learn more about her process and ideas, and how design fits into it all.
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05.06.15

Excerpt: Magazine

Anders Ruhwald in PIN-UP No. 18

In the lull between Milan and the frenzy of New York design week, it's easy to become a bit myopic about what's going on elsewhere in the design world. But we'd be remiss if we didn't point out an exhibition happening right now with one of most fascinating concepts we've ever come across: At Chicago's Volume Gallery last week, the Detroit ceramicist Anders Ruhwald opened "The Charred Room," an exhibition that explores "the aftermath of a fire – objects as they should be, recognizable to an extent in shape and position in relation to one another – but charred. Slumped, melted and morphed the objects lose their direct references that create comfort, leaving the viewer with renderings of domestic detritus vaguely familiar." We had the pleasure of speaking with Ruhwald about the lead-up and the process behind that exhibition earlier this year, on assignment for PIN-UP, and with the magazine's permission, we're excerpting that story here today.
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05.05.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

An Interview With Ford’s Moray Callum on the Future of Car Design

Next week marks the start of New York design week, which is jam-packed with events. But there is one place you'll be able to find a moment of respite from all the madness: inside the Dynamic Sanctuary, a 5' x 9' responsive light chamber created by Brooklyn studio the Principals for Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which is meant to bring the design thinking behind the 2015 Ford Edge to life.
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