03.28.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 23, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two amazing but different geometric mirrors (including this beach house–ready one by Alex Drew & No One), a digitally rendered interior that has us ready to move in, and vintage napkin rings that look like cool-girl jewelry — by none other than Nathalie du Pasquier.
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03.26.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Join us for the 2015 show!

After our phenomenally successful, inaugural Sight Unseen OFFSITE event last year — which included an Instagram-ready still-life photo booth, a Memphis-y soup of Print All Over Me goodness, and a cocktail party with a line around the block — the question on everyone's lips was: But will you do it again? Today, we're happy to announce that yes, Sight Unseen OFFSITE will be returning for a second, even more exciting year!
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03.25.15

Up and Coming

Jacqueline Klassen, Ceramicist

Jacqueline Klassen didn’t grow up around design; her father was a therapist and her mom a case management worker, and their family’s greatest joy was good food. She didn’t study it either; she holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and was often told, “Go to school! You’d be a great teacher!” But rather than teach, Klassen instead signed up for more classes herself — only this time it was a six-week course in ceramics. “I immediately was in love,” Klassen remembers. “I was always grasping for something that would be a good fit for me; I was trying to make something work, but I hadn’t yet found it.” Over the next year, she toyed with the idea of going to grad school for art history. But when she found herself in the studio, at the wheel more often than not, it became apparent that perhaps she should listen to her gut.
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03.24.15

Up and Coming

B-FIT Assemblage by Fact Non Fact

B-FIT, a project by the Seoul-based design collective Fact Non Fact, is the very definition of eye candy — the geometric shapes it comprises are meant not to function in specific ways, but merely to look pretty and highlight the materials they're made from, which include iron, brass, plaster, terra cotta, marble, wood, glass and concrete. If "A-FIT," according to Fact Non Fact, refers to all the objects in our lives that are optimized for specific functions, like chairs or door handles, "B-FIT" refers to the kinds of objects that aren't. After making the pieces, designers Jinsik Kim, Yuhun Kim, and Eunjae Lee brought them to life in three ways: as a physical installation, as a conceptual deskscape, and as the Assemblage images you see here.
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03.23.15

What They Bought

Julia Leonard of Either Way LA

“I sometimes think I wear too many hats,” says Julia Leonard, the Los Angeles–based artist, interior designer, curator, gallery owner, and shopkeeper, whose backyard retail venture Either Way LA — an every Sunday sale of thrifted or commissioned pieces — has recently become a hit via Instagram and word of mouth. Since moving from San Francisco a little more than four years ago, LA has offered her the chance, as it does to so many, to start over. In San Francisco, where she had studied, worked, and lived for over a decade, she had been teaching alongside her art practice. However Los Angles marked the opportunity to focus on her art, giving her a fresh perspective: “I even dress differently,” she admits wryly.
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12.18.12

Sighted

Lost Time by Glithero for Perrier-Jouet

In the tent at Design/Miami last week, nearly everything came with a price tag. RO/LU walnut and Formica bookcases: $3,800. Michael’s Genuine Ultimate Caprese Sandwich: $14. Even one of Snarkitecture’s upholstered foam benches, which welcomed tired fairgoers in the courtyard outside, could be snagged for a mere $5,000 from Chicago’s Volume Gallery. But there was one thing that wasn’t, that couldn’t be, for sale: The London-based studio Glithero’s Lost Time installation, which unfolded in a dark hallway near the café, the result of a commission from first-time Design/Miami sponsor Perrier-Jouët (who was kind enough to sponsor this editor’s plane ticket down as well.) There, the duo installed a series of looping weighted silver chains, which hung in perfect parabolas from the ceiling and, lit from below, cast reflections in a still clear pond beneath.
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03.21.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 16, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Bahamian ceramics wunderkind Instagrams her way into our hearts, a group design show makes us wish we lived in Saint-Étienne, and two Greek designers kill it with the most beautiful house (above) and choker necklace we've seen in recent memory.
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03.20.15

Shopping

In a Philly Photographer’s Hands, Photos That Look Like Digital Collages

We've been familiar with Philadelphia-based photographer Roxana Azar's work for some time now (last summer, she took the snaps for our story on fellow Philadelphian Page Neal of Bario-Neal (where Azar also works). But the second she sent us the latest personal series she's been working on, we knew we had to share. Azar digitally manipulates her photos to make them almost painterly or collage-like, but in the series we're sharing today, many of the images began as photographs from gardens where Azar spent her childhood. "I am really interested in using the photograph as a starting point to layer, erase, rebuild, and obscure an image, turning the image into something ambiguous yet playful," Azar says.
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03.19.15

Studio Visit

Nous Vous, Graphic Artists

“It’s about making language visual,” respond the three members of Nous Vous when I ask them about their distinctly French name, which translates to We, You. “Well, it rolls off the tongue nicely, too,” laughs Jay Cover, who founded the London-based trio with William Edmonds and Nicolas Burrows back in 2007. “But aside from that, our external influences tend to be design manifestos where the process is conscious of the audience and collaboration.” We, You — there is a certain anonymity to their practice, reflected also in their European website domain (nousvous.eu), placing the group nowhere specific, perhaps in an effort to avoid defining their collective body of work.
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03.18.15

Sighted

Acme Legacy’s Archival Memphis Jewelry

After our recent post on jewelry created by famous '80s-era Memphis-group architects, readers came to us asking where they could find the pieces (good luck), while even copies of the out-of-print book we pulled the images from immediately became exponentially harder to procure (for under $350, at least). And so despite the excitement the post generated, it was destined to remain a mere digital artifact for most. That's why we were so happy to discover, shortly thereafter, Acme's Legacy collection, through which the 30-year-old accessories brand — which these days focuses on designer pens — has been quietly pulling Memphis jewelry pieces out of its archives and making them available for sale at shockingly reasonable price points. From 1985 to 1992, Acme founders Adrian Olabuenaga and Leslie Bailey produced more than 100 different earrings, brooches, and necklaces by design titans like Ettore Sottsass, Joanna Grawunder, Alessandro Mendini, and George Sowden, a big chunk of which are now up for grabs on its Legacy page. We asked Olabuenaga a few questions about the history and future of the project.
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03.16.15

Sighted

Jesse Moretti Editions for Little Paper Planes

We've been huge fans of Cranbrook grad Jesse Moretti's work ever since her solo show at Patrick Parrish gallery (then Mondo Cane), way back in 2013. There's something about the palette Moretti uses, the saturated gradients she employs, and the way she zigzags back and forth between spare, geometric marks and full-bleed patterns that is absolutely perfect to us. The only problem with the pieces she made for Parrish was their ever-so-slightly out-of-reach price tag. So it was with great excitement that we stumbled upon Moretti's latest edition — a series of seven small works on paper (either 8.5 x 11" or 17 x 22") for the San Francisco–based shop and publishing house Little Paper Planes, ranging in price from $35 to $130. (Yes, we already put in our order!) We're posting images from that collection here today and also excerpting a brief interview Moretti did with LPP. Read all about here, then hop on over to the shop to make these beauties yours!
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03.14.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 9, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Three different projects that push the boundaries of glass, one photograph that suspends your belief in reality, and two books that subvert your expectations of what a book can do or be.
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03.13.15

Sighted

Ivin Ballen, Artist

We love an artist who can successfully blur the line between sculpture and painting, and Brooklyn-based Ivin Ballen is certainly no exception. Upon first viewing his work, you perceive a few colored shapes (some rectilinear, others more organic) haphazardly arranged on a vast backdrop. Upon closer inspection, you begin to notice those colored shapes are an assemblage of found materials, and that, in fact, those found materials are simply just painted casts of the originals.
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