02.18.15

From the Library Of

Esprit’s Brand Books

There are some books that are quoted, referenced, or photographed so often in our line of work that they begin to feel like touchstones for design-world enthusiasts all over the world. The Nathalie du Pasquier–illustrated Leonard Koren bible Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement is of those such books; the late-'90s graphic-design manifesto Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist is another. But recently, another book has begun popping up no matter where we look. Esprit: The Comprehensive Design Principle — a huge, softcover paean to every design aspect of the beloved 1980s fashion brand — was published in 1989 by its founder Douglas Tompkins, but has experienced a resurgence of late in these '80s nostalgia–tinged, Memphis revival–happy times.

02.17.15

Sighted

Flora Indoor

Every few seasons, it seems the internet cycles through a trending plant: flowering cacti, Fiddle Leaf Figs, Pilea Peperomiodies, Monsteras, succulent gardens, bouquets of dried eucalyptus (that you hang in the shower, natch), olive branches, an air plant in a terrarium. But here's a wild proposal: Are we actually in the era of the 2-D houseplant? 2014 had a number of contenders, from the art-driven Strange Plants to Polly Brown's study on office plants, to some sort of black and white Japanese ikebana reference on basically everyone's Instagram feed (guilty as charged). A new contender for this category is Barcelona-based Flora Indoor, a line of minimal (but cheerfully colorful) prints of thriving houseplants.

02.16.15

Sighted

Valentin Dommanget, Artist

Like most visually inclined folks his age, 25-year-old French artist Valentin Dommanget — who studied fashion as an undergrad before receiving his MFA at Central Saint Martins last spring — grew up with a steady diet of internet art. Having internalized a certain digital aesthetic that embraces all things geological and hypercolor, natural yet unnatural, he created a series of paintings that take those virtual influences and represent them through actual real-world handicraft, pairing paint-marbled canvases with torqued stretchers that mimic some kind of Photoshop rotation effect. Pictured above and below are selections from that series, plus other pieces that apply the same techniques to concrete tables, paper books, framed canvases, and crooked canvases that appear balanced atop geometric plywood cutouts.

02.14.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 9, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, the humble accent table takes on many forms: an iridescent I-beam, a rug-wrapped hexagon, and a charred-wood square with a hairy interior void.

02.13.15

Current Obsession

Andrew O. Hughes on DeWain Valentine

Our first-ever From the Archives post, which looked back at William Sklaroff's mid-century desk accessory set Radius One, dates back to November 10, 2009 — the very first day of Sight Unseen's existence. But after that, the column pretty much petered out, partly because we didn't have the time to research it properly and partly because, with millions upon millions of wonderful old things to potentially highlight, how could we ever choose just one? We've officially solved that problem today with the launch of our new and improved From the Archives series, in which designers and artists will do all the work for us: Each edition will invite a talent we admire to give a little history lesson on someone from the past who's had a strong impact on their work. Our first subject is Brooklyn glassmaker Andrew O. Hughes, speaking about the California Light and Space sculptor DeWain Valentine (no holiday-themed pun intended).

10.03.13

Sighted

Keehnan Konyha’s Safe House USA

How do you know when someone's a child of the '80s? Posting photos of Lisa Frank's headquarters on their blog is a pretty obvious clue. Brooklyn interior designer Keehnan Konyha has been tracking his eccentric tastes on his freestyling eponymous site for the past three years, and dipping into his formative decades liberally, so it didn't surprise us a bit when he totally went there for his Sight Unseen Self Portrait. His newest project is a bedding textile company called Safe House USA that's inspired by streetwear and the visual influences he tracks on the web, and he couldn't imagine a better way to showcase his first collection than to pin it up to a white metal grid in a way that should be familiar to anyone who grew up in the era of cheesy department store displays and layaways at TJMaxx. Published here are the exclusive photos Konyha shot of the series — which is printed with internet-approved motifs like faux marble, punctuation marks, and the black and white mottle unique to composition notebooks — along with the backstory behind both the collection and his vision for this project.

02.12.15

Sighted

Huy Bui on Freunde Von Freunden

Though we have a particular fondness for so many of the designers we've featured or worked with in the five years since Sight Unseen began, Huy Bui might be the only one who can lay claim to being both one of our favorite designers and the co-founder of one of our favorite New York restaurants. As the founder of Plant-In City — or what he calls architectural terrariums for "the 21st century" — Bui was one of the inaugural exhibitors at our Sight Unseen OFFSITE showcase last year. And as the designer and co-founder of the Lower East Side Vietnamese eatery An Choi, Bui's provided the backdrop for many a late-night design date. So when Freunde von Freunden reached out with the opportunity to co-publish a story on Bui's Brooklyn apartment and studio — complete with cameos by the designer's sweet dog Loopy, one of the more popular attractions at OFFSITE last year — we jumped at the chance.

02.11.15

Fair Report

Our Top Picks From the Stockholm Furniture Fair

February: a month synonymous with diminishing New Year’s resolutions, potential polar vortices, and the world’s largest meet-up of Scandinavian furniture and lighting designs. Expectations for this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair were higher than ever with positive winds sweeping through the industry (and Scandinavia in general, according to this week's New Yorker). Although the Nordic vernacular for high-quality craftsmanship still prevailed, this year welcomed debate around experimental methods and their significance for contemporary design. From across both the larger halls and the Greenhouse display for independent designers, we're highlighting some of our favorite products from the week here.

02.10.15

Gift Guides

Our Valentine’s Day Gift Guide

If you're anything like us, the idea of receiving a big, overpriced bouquet on Valentine's Day seems not only a little bit schmaltzy, but also a little bit of a waste, with all the amazing design objects out there your significant other could be spending his or her money on. Isn't it more romantic or them to be so thoughtful as to gift you something you might really, actually want? With that in mind — and with a little nudge from our friends at Aether, whose strikingly minimalist Cone speaker we had on our own wish lists long before they reached out to us — we present the first ever Sight Unseen Valentine's Day gift guide, featuring 11 items guaranteed to melt the heart of any design-lover in your life.

02.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Doty/Glasco at CES Gallery

We had never heard of the photography husband-and-wife team of JR Doty and Joe Glasco — or the LA gallery CES — before this exhibition announcement arrived in our inbox today, but as soon as we saw the photos we were hooked. The two photographers began collaborating professionally back in 2013, and their current work draws from an archive of more than 40,000 images that were taken on a road trip across America over the last year. Doty and Glasco photographed specific locations, like Utah and California, because of their unique geological conditions. "The images represent the essence of nature with an emphasis on the phenomena of time as it affects the landscape’s topography, such as rippling water, striations of marble and the constant changing of landforms," the press release reads.

02.07.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 2, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two groundbreakingly gorgeous ways to hang your clothes, two making-of videos featuring Misha Kahn and Rafael de Cardenas, and two of the hottest Mexican talents to come out of the Zona Maco art show.

02.06.15

Sighted

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s Steel Curtains

We first caught sight of one of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's colorful curtains at Esther Schipper gallery's booth at Frieze New York last year, where we couldn't stop taking pictures of how nicely it framed the crowds rushing by on the other side. But we'd forgotten all about the Spanish-born, Brazilian-based artist until more of those curtains popped up on Sight Unseen contributor Su Wu's blog I'm Revolting last week. Steegmann appears to have a very philosophically rich practice, full of meshes and grids and insect forms that reference Brazilian oil laborers and the writings of Roger Caillois, but the curtains, from what we can tell, are pure formalism, and the best kind — they completely transform your experience of a space. They curtains themselves are made from steel mesh and produced by a Spanish interiors company called KriskaDecor, but with geometric cutouts lined in laser-cut and powder-coated steel frames.

02.04.15

Up and Coming

Ferris McGuinty, Artist

If you go looking on the internet for information about a Cornwall-based maker named Ferris McGuinty, chances are you won't find much. Yes, McGuinty is on the younger side (we were born in the same year, so at least that's what I'm telling myself) but even more than that: Ferris McGuinty didn't exist until 2009. The name was merely a pseudonym the artist took on to allow himself the freedom to make work that was unlike anything he'd done before. Having graduated from art school in the early 2000s, McGuinty previously made work that was smaller in scale, tiny, almost architectural-like models. As a respite from that, he began gathering found objects — "I'm quite a prolific hoarder," he says proudly — and marrying them with elements of his own creation to make the kind of assemblage objects you see at the top of this post. "Ferris came about because because the work really had that day-off vibe. McGuinty somehow naturally followed suit. But it allowed me a sense of detachment from my own work. I could be much more playful and not worried about what direction it went in."