12.06.13

Fair Report

At Art Basel and Design Miami 2013: Part I

Hello from sunny Miami! Sight Unseen has been here all week attending the 2013 Art Basel and Design Miami shows, and it's been a wild ride, as usual. We've brunched with Ruinart and Piet Hein Eek, partied with Dom Perignon and Jeff Koons, and seen performances by Jonah Bokaer and Pharrell. We almost did yoga with Grey Area, but got (happily) stuck hanging out at NADA instead. We tried to document it all, but it hasn't been easy — here's a small taste of what we've seen so far! We'll be back next week with a more comprehensive post, but for now, check out these pics and then head over to our Facebook album to see dozens and dozens more.
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12.05.13

Sighted

Of-The-Moment Ceramics — And Mushrooms? — At a New Brooklyn Pop-Up

Since it opened in the summer of 2012, Frank Traynor’s Perfect Nothing Catalog — an ice shack–turned-shop that its owner transplanted from upstate New York to Brooklyn — has already relocated twice: from its original home in a Greenpoint garden to the backyard of a gallery in Bushwick, and, very briefly this summer, to a subway platform in Williamsburg. That particular pitstop, set up outside a more permanent subway retail outlet called The Newsstand, was a show called Behind Flamingo Plaza. “It was named after my high-school hangout, an all thrift-store strip mall in Miami — a very formative space for my aesthetic and a vibe I wanted to honor,” explains Traynor.
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12.04.13

Shopping

Alpha Cruxis by Rebecca Martin

Tasmanian-born designer Rebecca Martin started the fashion label Alpha Cruxis earlier this summer from her studio in Neuköln, Berlin. Its launch collection consists of five geometrically shaped handbags that Martin meticulously handcrafts from rigid 3mm-thick Italian leather, using methods she likens more to carpentry than fashion design — sanding, carving, etc.
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12.02.13

Invitation

Shop Sight Unseen on Print All Over Me

In April, we introduced you to BYCO, a production platform and online shop for custom clothing designs submitted by up-and-coming fashion talents. But BYCO also had a small section for housewares, where designers could apply imagery to a standardized selection of pillows, duvets, and curtains — an idea that co-founders Jesse and Meredith Finkelstein have taken one step further with their new spinoff project, Print All Over Me. The site harnesses the same overseas manufacturing capabilities the pair utilize for BYCO, but instead of producing custom pieces, it offers designers a choice of eight blanks onto which they can apply any image file — think CafePress, but with shirts, sweatpants, hats, pillows, totes, and scarfs that are actually fashion-forward (Jesse's also the designer behind the New York label JF&Son). Print All Over Me is technically still in beta, but we were so excited about its possibilities that we invited a few friends — Will Bryant, Mel Nguyen, New Friends, Clay Hickson, and Tim Colmant —to post a few items just for us. Read on to check out and shop their mini-collections, or create and sell your own designs.
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11.30.13

Saturday Selects

Week of November 25, 2013

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and events from the past seven or so days. This week: hot guys in design, a new online furniture shop in Berlin, Artsy's definitive Design Miami preview (including the Jeff Zimmerman ombre vases above), and more.
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06.26.12

Sighted

New Work By My Bauhaus Is Better Than Yours

From the start, the young Weimar students behind My Bauhaus Is Better Than Yours gave themselves a crushingly large reputation to live up to. Not their alma mater's creative legacy, mind you, but those tote bags, given away when the collective-turned-production company launched in 2009. Bearing its name in a thin block print, the bags made for the perfect product even before you saw the group's actual work, and for awhile you couldn't turn a single corner at a design event without running into someone wearing one. But to the credit of the now Berlin-based company's founders — graphic designers Manuel Goller and Daniel Burchard — each furniture collection continues to hit the proverbial nail on the head, combining appealingly graphic shapes with just the right dose of functionality. Earlier this week, My Bauhaus re-launched its webshop with a new design, lower prices, and new products, some of which debuted earlier this year in Milan. We asked three of the designers behind those works to send us a list of five things that inspired their piece, from Bret Easton Ellis to solitaire.
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11.27.13

Studio Visit

Renato D’Agostin, Photographer

Renato D'Agostin was born and raised in Venice, Italy, "where for most people photography in those days meant weddings and passport pictures," he says. Yet the city did manage to nurture his future career, if only inadvertently so: After falling in love with a photograph of an elephant that his mother won in a town prize drawing, he commandeered his father's Nikon, signed up for a local photography class, and spent his teenage years documenting scenes from everyday Venetian life, a process he's hewed towards ever since. Still, he considers his first foray away from home in 2002, on a road trip through the capitals of Western Europe, to be his most formative experience. "I took that trip to see if interpreting reality was what I really wanted to do," D'Agostin recalls. "From that moment on, I never had any doubt. I felt like traveling was the place where I wanted to live, and the camera was my extension."
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11.26.13

Sighted

George Nelson’s Kirkpatrick House on WHY

It’s hard to say, looking at the image above —with its freestanding kiln-like fireplace, its red-palette Persian rug, and its chic indoor garden — whether the interior featured is genuinely vintage or simply one of the excellent contemporary facsimiles that populate board after Pinterest board these days. But in some ways, that’s precisely the point. The interior above, featured this week on Herman Miller’s excellent WHY blog, was designed in the 1950s by George Nelson, and like many of Nelson’s designs, it is as usable and contemporary today as it was half a century ago.
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11.23.13

Saturday Selects

Week of November 18, 2013

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and events from the past seven or so days. This week: a cement-truck mural, a furniture collection about shark-hunting, a pretty way to empty your pockets, and more.
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11.22.13

The Making of

Material Material, by Doug Johnston & Debbie Carlos

The practice of two artists collaborating by mail is nothing new; after all, that’s how Peter Shire communicated ideas to his Memphis colleagues back in 1980s Milan and how Alex Segreti and Kelly Rakowski of New Friends got their start (with the former in Philly and the latter in New York.) But what happens when you elevate that practice to something more like a parlor game? We here at Sight Unseen had been wondering that ourselves, which is why we were especially tickled when we found out that Debbie Carlos and Doug Johnston — two of our favorites — had recently happened upon the exact same idea.
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11.21.13

Travel

Kiosk in Athens, Greece

There were several reasons Alisa Grifo wanted to take her Kiosk co-founder Marco Romeny to Greece for their newest themed collection of everyday objects, which launches today. But the most pressing was the fact that Greece's ongoing economic woes have shuttered scores of small businesses, and continue to do so the longer they persist. "It felt like half of Athens was closed," says Grifo, who traveled there with Romeny in early October. "We would find something and try to contact the manufacturer and their phone would be disconnected. We felt an urgency to go now before more and more disappeared." The irony is that Greece is also the last collection for the couple before they're forced to pull their own disappearing act of sorts, thanks to economics of an entirely different kind.
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11.20.13

Studio Visit

Adi Goodrich, Set Designer

Instead of making things as a way to survive obsolescence, the physical remainders that will outlast us all, Adi Goodrich’s work lives for only a few days before being broken back down into pieces. “I’m not really into all that ego of trying make stuff that stays forever,” the Los Angeles-based designer admits. “I’m much more interested in the cycle of creativity, in making things happen, and surrounding myself with everyone who wants to come with.” Which means that Goodrich, who was just honored with an Art Directors Club “Young Guns” award, might have willed herself into a perfect job: set design.
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