08.15.13

Sighted

Anthony Gerace’s Seaside Towns Index

A few months ago, the London artist Anthony Gerace made the blog rounds with a series of paper collages sourced from 1960s-era magazines. But arresting as those were, when we went snooping on his website, we found something we liked even better: Gerace’s photography work, which includes The Seaside Towns Index we’re featuring today. It is, as Gerace describes it, “a collection of landscape photographs, contextual still-lifes and portraits of seaside towns in England, showing the fading grandeur, disarray and chaos that's in them, but also the quietly compassionate and strange elements that are uniquely theirs.” We asked Gerace to tell us a little bit more about the project.

08.14.13

Sight Unseen Presents

The BYCO Design Contest Results!

A few months ago, we launched a contest with BYCO, the new micro-financing site for fashion and housewares designers, founded by Jesse Finkelstein of JF & Son and his sister Meredith. The Kickstarter-like site invites designers to submit products, which then must be funded by supporters in order to cover the costs of making a prototype. Our contest allowed readers to submit designs that, if chosen by Sight Unseen’s editors, would bypass the funding stage and move straight to production. At the time, we had no idea what would happen. Would anyone enter? If they did, would those brave souls be plucked from the world of designers we were already familiar with? Happily, the pool was wider than we ever could have imagined. The five chosen designers, who were picked relatively blindly, range from an ITP design student to a contractor-turned-artist in San Diego to — just one! — former Sight Unseen subject, the lovely Jennifer Parry Dodge of Ermie (whose Kid Gunta duvet is shown above). Which just goes to show that BYCO isn’t merely for amateurs looking to get a foot in the door: Even for a pro like Dodge, BYCO offers opportunities that would never be possible with a small-scale production set-up. “This was an amazing opportunity, and it's a fantastic service that BYCO is providing to independent designers such as myself,” Dodge says. We couldn’t agree more! Read on to get to know the winners of the Sight Unseen/BYCO contest and click here to purchase their incredibly cool designs.

08.12.13

8 Things

Michael Klein of Toronto’s MKG127 Gallery

According to Canadian curator Michael Klein, when people think of art in Vancouver, they think of photo-conceptualism. When they think of Winnipeg, it’s the Royal Art Lodge, the drawing collective founded in 1996 that launched the careers of talents like Marcel Dzama. But Toronto, on the other hand, resists such classifications — it’s one of the most diverse cities in the world, says Klein, and the same can be said for its art scene. So why do we automatically associate the city with the kind of clever, minimalist conceptual work that Klein shows at MKG127, the gallery he founded there in 2007? Blame the artist Micah Lexier — we covered his amazing A to B installation on Sight Unseen in 2010, and then proceeded to fall down the MKG rabbit hole, marveling both at the subtle, obsessive-compulsive thrills that characterize many of the works shown there and at the weird cohesiveness of Klein’s vision.

08.07.13

Q+A

The Grantchester Pottery

What happens when two conceptual artists meet on a retreat in the English countryside and get to grips with ceramics in an abandoned studio? In the case of The Grantchester Pottery, they form a decorative arts collective that feels more like a piece of conceptual art — which is a bit misleading, considering The Grantchester Pottery sounds a lot like a heritage brand, and these guys don’t just throw pots. In fact, they don’t throw at all. “It’s not that we have not tried!” says co-founder Giles Round.

08.05.13

Studio Visit

Christy Matson, Textile Artist

In the parallel universe of false starts, where every cabinet is filled with tools you’ll never use again and every heart with ideas that didn’t stick, artist Christy Matson is a welcome presence, a reminder that sometimes lost things have a way of finding you again. Matson bought her first loom before she’d ever woven, certain that she would take immediately to the repetition and logic of it: “I was, like, I’m going to love weaving, I just know it! I had never met a textile-related process I didn't like,” Matson says. “And then I took a weaving class the next semester and hated it. I thought, this is it? This is boring.”

11.10.10

Invitation

Happy Birthday, Sight Unseen

On November 10, 2009, Sight Unseen launched with just twelve stories and two readers (thanks, moms). A year later, we've posted nearly 200 stories, visited studios in more than a dozen cities around the world, and found readers from Argentina to Australia. In our ongoing quest to offer an intimate look at process and the obsessions of creative people, we've come across artists who collect Finnish trolls, designers who mime their objects before making them, and stylists who sculpt realistic-looking hamburgers from slabs of German wood and tree bark. To celebrate Sight Unseen's one-year anniversary, we reached out to some of those inspiringly creative folks — like Mary & Matt, whose animated chocolate-bar gif is above and whose home studio we visited last spring — as well as to readers we've yet to meet, asking them to create a birthday card just for the occasion. We hope that you enjoy the results, and that you continue to make Sight Unseen a destination in the next year and beyond.

08.01.13

What They Bought

Keren Richter and Gabriel Kuo’s RATS Pop-Up Shop in Berlin

Talk about the right place at the wrong time: I left Berlin to come back to New York two weeks ago, and thus managed to miss what may end up being the coolest event of the summer, tonight's opening of Keren Richter and Gabriel Kuo's RATS pop-up shop in Mitte. Kuo, who's an art director and graphic designer, and Richter, an illustrator and artist, are both longtime New Yorkers who (like me) consider Berlin as something of a second home; for RATS, they joined forces to bring the German capital a strange sampling of some of their favorite objects and oddities from New York and beyond, everything from Fort Standard bottle openers to Knicks hats to strange souvenirs they've acquired on their travels. If you're in Berlin or headed there, don't miss the chance to visit the shop at Torstrasse 68 before it closes at the end of August. Otherwise, get a virtual sneak peek at it here, alongside an interview with Richter and Kuo about how and why they put the RATS project together.

07.31.13

Sighted

Korban/Flaubert’s Hunter Maquettes

Sydney's Korban/Flaubert make large-scale sculptures and design objects out of flowing, bending, beautifully contorted metal — objects that show off both their own technical capabilities and those of their Sydney metalworking studio. But before they scale up, they often start small, with miniature models that function like a sketchbook come to life, showing off their ideas to potential clients. Their latest series of maquettes — each of which is only a few feet wide — features "a single folded, crushed line compressed into an agitated solid," they write. "An artifact in Corten steel."

07.30.13

Sighted

Ben Medansky Studio Visit on Los Angeles, I’m Yours

It's a quiet summer week here at Sight Unseen HQ. August is approaching, we're spending more and more weekends out of the city, and the time in between them is becoming increasingly shorter and less productive. But that doesn't mean we don't know from hard work — we've spent the last four years pouring inordinate amounts of time and effort into the stories on this site, and so we're all the more sympathetic when we see other blogs doing the same. Case in point: the ridiculously extensive, print mag–worthy interview with ceramicist Ben Medansky we spotted recently on the blog Los Angeles, I'm Yours, a city-centric cultural resource founded in 2011 by The Fox Is Black's Bobby Solomon with editor Kyle Fitzpatrick. We've excerpted part of it here, along with a selection of the accompanying studio photos.

07.26.13

Up and Coming

Katie Stout, Furniture Designer

What were you doing at age 24? Muddling through grad school? Working as a CAD monkey? Moving back in with your parents? If so, you might be more than a little jealous of recent RISD grad Katie Stout, who at that tender age already holds the post of gallery director at New York's Johnson Trading Gallery, where Paul Johnson not only represents her work but encourages her to introduce him to that of her peers (like Noho Next alum and future SU subject Misha Kahn, for example). Before she landed the job, Stout's only previous employment was a one-summer college internship for the novelty housewares brand Fred and Friends: "I showed the creative director my portfolio, and when he saw a table I'd made as a sophomore that was an udder with milk squirting out of its teats, he asked me what I was on," she recalls. "Obviously I said nothing."

07.22.13

The Making of

Wary Meyers’ Candles

If you want to put too fine a point on it, you could say that John and Linda Meyers specialize professionally in obscurity. The couple run a brand and webshop called Wary Meyers, where they sell flea-market ephemera that often have a delightful but abstruse narrative attached, and their own goods like Gonks, which are handmade creatures for kids based on an old World War I British archetype. They also made themselves scarce a few years ago when John, a former visual merchandiser at Anthropologie, and Linda, an art director, picked up and left Manhattan for a quieter life in Portland, Maine. But as a young couple with a very young child, they felt increasingly that they ought to be investing their time in something that might one day become ubiquitous: “The thing with our company is we’ve always done a lot of one-offs and prototypes — things where we’ll make one item and then it’s like, ‘Well, how do we produce them somewhat cheaply and not in China?’” says Linda. “And everything we did before seemed slightly esoteric. We had a book where we did 50 DIY projects and people loved the products and were like, ‘Do you want to sell them?’ And it was kind of like, ‘Well, do you want to pay $1500 for a dresser?’” Which is why last week, the couple released their first — “dare I say mainstream?” jokes Linda — product: A line of scented candles with iconic-seeming packaging and incredibly inviting-sounding scents.

07.18.13

Sighted

Leon Ransmeier on Herman Miller’s Why Blog

Most design fans know Leon Ransmeier's name — and the minimalist, hyper-functional work he's known for — and yet he flies relatively under the radar in the New York scene, with very selective participation in pop-up shops, exhibitions, and even industry parties (the ones that aren't thrown by yours truly, of course). It's a smart strategy, in a way, because whenever he does pop his head up, we take particular notice. Earlier this week, an as-told-to essay appeared on Herman Miller's newly relaunched Why blog, exploring his ideas about contemporary tables and table usage (Ransmeier recently debuted the AGL worktable for HM) — complete with photos of New York City tables both real and makeshift — and we couldn't resist reposting it here for your enjoyment.

07.16.13

8 Things

Jonathan Nesci, Furniture Designer

When Jonathan Nesci was 23 — with a one-year-old at home, and working as a forklift operator at FedEx in Chicago while attending night school for 3-D drafting at a community college — one of his coworkers gave him a fateful nudge: “He knew I wanted to design furniture, and he was like, ‘You can do it!!’,” recalls Nesci, now 31. And so he cold-emailed Richard Wright, founder of the eponymous Chicago auction house, and promoted the heck out of himself until he landed a job managing Wright’s restoration department, where he stayed for five years before founding his own studio in early 2012. As he tells it, his cheerleader at FedEx deserves substantial credit for inspiring him to take the leap that changed his life. But to know Nesci is to realize that no matter what happened, the results would have been the same — he was destined to be a designer.

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