Marco Campardo and the Marta Gallery Founders On Obsessive YouTubing, Failed Projects, and the Importance of Craftsmanship in Design

Considering the Italian designer Marco Campardo’s long friendship with Marta Gallery founders Benjamin Critton and Heidi Korsavong — as well as the trio’s shared interest in a multidisciplinary approach — we decided to go Interview Magazine–style with this Q&A and allow the three room to riff on ideas about collaboration, identity, and digital representation in design.
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This Canadian Design Show Was Dreamed Up Before the Pandemic. So Why Is It About Mutation, Isolation, and Fear of the Unknown?

Set in an abandoned, somewhat post-apocalyptic-looking building in the middle of Montréal, FICTIONS offers visitors a surveillance-like experience, with four different camera angles offering a glimpse of the half-shrouded pieces, alongside an eerie accompanying score. Though there was no brief, many of the pieces play with ideas about mutation and perception.
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Sara Rydberg Nilsson on the Perks and Pitfalls of Turning Your Home Into a Gallery

It may sound like some sort of aesthetic fever dream to live full time in a design gallery but, in practice, it’s not without its hazards. After a show at her flat-turned-exhibition space in Stockholm, interior designer Sara Rydberg Nilsson, aka Studio Hilda, left a pink ceramic raku sculpture by Swedish artist Bo Arenander in a corner of one of the apartment’s rooms. “My son Max accidentally knocked it over,” she says, recalling her horror. Though the sculpture ultimately survived the trauma, it was left with a deep crack, threatening the integrity of its delicate structure. The upside? She had an excuse to keep it for herself.
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Week of April 19, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a pop star's Melbourne home that's genuinely to die for, the return of a beloved LA exhibition, and a flat-pack wooden table that looks like an Aalto left out in the sun (above).
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The Soft Serve Aesthetic of Anton Alvarez’s Extruded Ceramic Sculptures

The Flavour Is So Strong — Anton Alvarez’s second solo exhibition at the Stockholm gallery Larsen Warner — opened last week, situating Alvarez’s hyper-colorful, texturally striking sculptures within a peaceful white setting at the gallery’s new space in Ostermalm. Alvarez has always been interested in formal instability, and these new objects — a continuation of his work with a kind of automated ceramic extrusion — challenge our perception of weight as well as gravity, while embracing the imperfections inherent to the process of transforming wet clay inside a kiln.
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Heading to New Mexico? Rent the Vintage-Furnished Ranch of a Beloved LA Fashion Designer

If the headline of this story seems to assume that you might, in fact, be heading to New Mexico soon, it’s entirely intentional — the state is again becoming a haven for a new wave of creatives. One of them is the Los Angeles fashion designer Raquel Allegra, who went to New Mexico a year and a half ago in search of real estate for a healing commune she was planning with a group of friends, but ended up buying her own sprawling 8,000 square-foot vacation home in Taos that she rents out part-time on Airbnb.
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Stacey Rees’s Abstract Female Portraits Capture a Moment of Inner Contemplation

In her previous works, the Australian painter Stacey Rees seemed to be captivated by the strange and modern notion of the selfie. Her portraits explored the idea that people can define their self-worth by the public face they show to the world and that people can, in fact, manipulate those images for a better outcome. What comprised the inner life of those who swore by such digital machinations, she seemed to ask? In her new body of work, which was on view this month at the Sydney gallery Saint Cloche, Rees appears to sink even deeper into the stillness of contemplation.
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Week of April 12, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the Fabio Novembre of our generation, the future of design fairs, and the power of blue paint.
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This Mexican Modernist Masterpiece by Mario Pani Is Now a Rentable Guest House

Architect Miggi Hood, Yola Mezcal co-founder Yola Jimenez, and entrepreneur Marie Cazalaa knew they’d struck gold when — having set out to find a property in their part-time home of Mexico City that they could turn into a stylish guest house — they acquired a charismatic residence built in 1962 by the famed Mexican architect Mario Pani. The home had been in the same family since its construction and was extremely run-down; the three friends won the bid by promising to fully restore it and invite others in to experience its design and its history. They spent two years turning it into Casa Pani, which is now bookable on Airbnb.
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Emily Mullin Jack Hanley

Emily Mullin’s 3D Reliefs Are Like Morandi Still-Lifes On Acid

The new sculptures that make up Brooklyn-based artist Emily Mullin’s just-opened show at Jack Hanley Gallery are, to put it lightly, a riot: fringed or seemingly filigreed ceramic vessels scrawled on with what looks like crayon or painted in imprecise patterns, sitting atop blobby, brightly colored plinths. At first glance, you wouldn’t associate the boisterous reliefs with the quiet, muted tones found in still lifes by 20th-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, but upon further inspection, the comparison makes a lot of sense.
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