05.04.21

Sighted

Molecular Biologist By Day, Ceramicist By Night: How Science Informs Abid Javed’s Art

The Hong Kong–born, London-based artist Abid Javed became a ceramicist almost by accident: While studying for his PhD in biochemistry, Javed began searching for a medium he could dabble in to fulfill a desire to make 3D forms inspired by molecules. "I considered glass initially, but it seemed too technical to pursue as a hobby," Javed recalls. "Ceramics felt and became more intuitive." A hobby soon became a full-blown art practice; the resulting series is called Pleomorphs.

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05.03.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Motherhood — And the Ways In Which It Challenges Us to Create — Is At the Center of This Exhibition

The idea for Egg Collective's third "Designing Women" exhibition was born long before the pandemic struck. Back in 2018, Egg's co-founders — Hilary Petrie, Crystal Ellis, and Stephanie Beamer, along with Ellis's sister, the artist Tealia Ellis Ritter — had the idea to curate a selection of female artists and designers who also happened to be mothers, and who often worked with or chafed against the constraints of motherhood in order to create.

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05.01.21

Saturday Selects

Week of April 26, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Yves Klein–inspired mirrors by Ben and Aja Blanc, a multi-colored Dims chair remix by Dusen Dusen, and the latest purveyor of high-quality affordable art to catch our eye (above).

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04.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Gallery Show in London Takes Wood to Unexpected Places

Maybe it's because I've been watching Ellen's Next Great Designer (which, honestly, you should be as well, it's highly entertaining and it features THREE former Sight Unseen subjects!), but an exhibition where designers riff on the range and versatility of wood feels extremely low-stakes. (Also not a knock; it's an appropriately sized brief for coming out of a year of lockdown). But that's also what makes it all the more impressive that Gallery FUMI's first exhibition of 2021, called The Beautiful Grain and featuring 11 of the gallery's artists, should be so insanely inventive.

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04.28.21

In Conversation

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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10.10.19

Interiors

A Spanish Architect’s Wildly Colorful Renovation, Inspired By Disco and Nightclubs

Mario Montesinos Marco is just one year out of architecture school, but this marks already the second time we've featured his interiors, and this one's a doozy: For the renovation of a friend's apartment in Valencia's Ruzafa neighborhood, the Spanish architect designed most of the furniture and lighting according to the same principle that drove his art school thesis — "disco space."

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04.27.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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04.26.21

At Home With

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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04.24.21

Saturday Selects

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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04.23.21

Interiors

Paulin Chairs and Pistachio Concrete: A 1930s-Inspired Boutique Lands in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, at the Culver City development known as Platform, a new womenswear boutique called Teller, from Platform founders David Fishbein and Joey Miller opened, and the space — designed by Mike Moser Studio — is hugely inspiring. Moser primarily looked to 1930’s Mexico City for cues, and it's hard to pick a favorite element.

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04.22.21

Interiors

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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04.19.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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04.17.21

Saturday Selects

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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