03.07.14

Studio Visit

Mel Nguyen, Artist

As an artistically inclined teenager feeling bored and marooned in the suburbs of Minnesota, Mel Nguyen did what any millenial in her situation would do: She turned to the internet for creative stimulation. “Even as a high schooler I was looking at all these graphic design blogs, seeing how the field was changing, and thinking, wow,” she says. As soon as she enrolled as an art student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she started her own tumblr, showing off her experiments sliding from 2-D into to 3-D and back again. She managed to build such a following on the site that her work went viral in certain online art and design circles — so much so that it’s hard to believe she’s only 21, and won’t graduate until this spring.
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03.06.14

Sighted

The Fruit Shop by Hsian Jung

Taiwan-born, London-based Hsian Jung works as a curator and interior stylist, but in his spare time, he recently started a hand-formed ceramics line called The Fruit Shop, through whose website he releases collections inspired by individual fruits and vegetables. "Friends were describing my pottery as reminiscent of sweet melons and pumpkins, an insight that inspired this project," explains Jung. To launch his first series, based around the cantaloupe, he styled a series of photographs using "cheap objects from daily life that have similar color tones as the ceramics but totally different textures," he says.
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03.06.14

Fair Report

The 2014 Whitney Biennial

Perhaps the most telling moment regarding this year's Whitney Biennial came when we posted an image of Dutch artist Peter Schuyff's spiral-carved pencils on Instagram. "Where is this craft show?" joked Mondo Cane's Patrick Parrish. "Bedford Ave?" he asked, referring to Brooklyn's main hipster thoroughfare. Yep, this biennial feels decidedly different than years past. There are still inscrutable videos, and works we simply slid by for lack of interest, but this year had moments that felt smaller, more tactile, more intimate — and for us, more compelling — than in years past.
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03.03.14

Q+A

Nicole Patel on Her Textile Wall Panels

When we first met the multi-talented Nicole and Sweetu Patel back in 2004, they were running Brooklyn's Citizen Citizen, a high-concept British design showroom that sold objects like crucifix-shaped brushes by FredriksonStallard. But they gave up the project shortly afterward, and have continued to evolve creatively in the last decade: Nicole went on to focus on her interior design business and form a creative partnership with curator Josee Lepage, while Sweetu went on to work for Cappellini and later founded the men's heritage clothing shop C.H.C.M. It was there that we recently spotted Nicole's latest brilliant endeavor, a series of wall panels that she makes from the likes of Japanese indigo textiles and Belgian linen, meticulously stretched and then embellished with things like handmade rope or tone-on-tone embroidery. Beyond hanging them in her husband's store, she hadn't yet put them out in the world, so we decided to do the honors.
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03.01.14

Saturday Selects

Week of February 24, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture worthy of a "French Fries Party," super-minimalist $99 lamps, candy-colored stools by Jeff Martin (above), and incredibly styled images by the likes of Gemma Tickle and the Bouroullec brothers.
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01.04.13

Sighted

New Jewelry by Nhat-Vu Dang

Sometimes we furiously scour the internet or go gallery-hopping for inspiration. But sometimes, new good things just fall into our laps (something for which we’re particularly grateful on these tough days back after a holiday!) Case in point: These amazing new necklaces and brooches by recent Rietveld Academy grad Nhat-Vu Dang, which arrived in our inbox yesterday. It’s no secret we love ourselves a large, mixed-media necklace, and these fit the bill nicely, made from glass, wood, paint, high-density foam, and epoxy (the brooches are foam and steel). The new pieces, on view at the Amsterdam jewelry gallery Rob Koudijs through the end of February, are an extension of Dang’s graduation project: sculptural pieces of jewelry made from gray cardboard, which revealed hidden flashes of color when worn. The new pieces, says curator Ward Schrijver, are even more conceptual but no less covetable.
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02.28.14

Sighted

Equilibrio Frágil y Simétrico by Cristian Montesinos

For his ongoing series of miniature totems, Barcelona-based graphic and furniture designer Cristian Montesinos collects and paints scraps of found wood, which he keeps on hand for the assembly and photographing of each piece. "Biking or walking in Barcelona I always find what I need," he says. "I keep the pieces, classified by size, and use them when I need them. When I work with these woods, I feel I'm returning to them a part of the dignity that was lost when they were thrown away. When I paint them I try not to completely cover the material, as part of the idea is to show and appreciate the tangible past of the object."
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02.27.14

Sighted

Last, a New Swedish Design Trio

No pun intended, but we had to share one last find from this month’s Stockholm Design Week: Last, a new arena for selling one-of-a-kind products by Swedish design trio Åsa Jungnelius, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, and Fredrik Paulsen. They are, respectively, a glass designer working with glass, a potter with clay and a furniture designer with wood. All share a common desire for not only producing sustainable products, but also to promote a kind of design that is slower, more considered, and intended to stand the test of time (i.e. the last spoon you might ever buy).
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02.26.14

Q+A

Alex Proba on A Poster A Day

In her day job, Alex Proba works as a graphic designer at Kickstarter. But every night when she comes home from work, Proba sits down for 30 minutes at her computer and creates a poster, either from manipulated found imagery or from shapes and patterns she's created on her own. Then she posts the final product to Tumblr, as she has every day for the past 250 days. It's the kind of experiment that every creative person says they'll do — what writer hasn't vowed to pound out words in the early hours of the morning? — but hardly anyone ever makes good on.
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02.25.14

Sighted

Otto Knits

Despite a BFA from Parsons, Roula Nassar sees her grandfather as the biggest influence in her design education. "He was an engineer by trade, but he was also a self taught sculptor and photographer. If something interested him he would take it upon himself to figure out how to do it, in his own way. I really identify with that approach — working outside of a system or industry to conceive things in a singular way." You can certainly see his legacy in Nassar's multi-disciplinary studio Otto. Based in Brooklyn, Otto has an output ranging from photography, through books and film, to the three dimensional: knitwear and a currently-in-progress resin bowl.
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02.22.14

Saturday Selects

Week of February 17, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: inside the homes of two design powerhouses, a visit to fave duo New Friends (above), and a Richard Serra parked in the middle of Manhattan.
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02.21.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Cray Collective at Stockholm Design Week

You can sometimes guess at the greatness of an exhibition based purely on its location (a little off-the-beaten track, naturally), or when its roster lists nothing short of five talented up-and-coming designers. With that in mind, it seemed only right to plow the bitter, wintry streets of Stockholm earlier this month to find out more about the new, colorful Cray Collective.
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02.20.14

Sighted

Fort Standard’s Home Goods

Today, a trifecta of awesomeness: The entire home goods line from Brooklyn designers and Sight Unseen favorites Fort Standard, photographed by talented SU contributor Brian Ferry, and styled by Monica Nelson — a new name to us, but you can bet we've been perusing her portfolio of great work for brands like Urban Outfitters and Wilder Quarterly. Greg and Ian of Fort Standard have been majorly expanding the scope of their work lately — designing interiors for clients like Steven Alan Home and Harry's, furniture for Matter and Roll & Hill, and, you know, creating a massive beer luge for our Bowery Hotel party last year — but it's their growing collection of beautifully considered home goods that's making them a household name. Pretty, minty sand-cast aluminum bowls, hanging wood-plank cutting boards, geometric stone trivets — and they've never looked better than they do here.
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