Matthew Byrd Noguchi stone sculptures
05.19.21

Sighted

Using Stone That’s Destined for the Dump, Matthew Byrd Creates These Interlocking, Noguchi-Inspired Sculptures

As a sculptor and stonemason, artist Matthew Byrd spends a lot of time driving around his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. Much of that time is spent looking at old buildings for inspiration, noticing how one intersects with the roof of another, trying to figure out how he can translate those moments into his stacked stone sculptures. But his travels often have a more practical purpose as well — late at night, Byrd drives around scoping out abandoned lots or construction sites from which he can gather raw material that would otherwise be destined for the dump.
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05.18.21

Q+A

In Her Paintings, Becky Suss Creates Real or Imagined Interiors From Memory

Because we don't cover art as our primary discipline here at Sight Unseen, we typically discover artists a bit more slowly than we do designers, and usually by way of gallery shows, art fairs, or Instagram wormholes. But I discovered Philadelphia-born painter Becky Suss in perhaps the most Sight Unseen — or at least the most me — way possible: Her 2016 painting, August (above), adorns the cover of LA harpist Mary Lattimore's Hundreds of Days, one of the many albums that helped propel me through the emotional black hole that was 2020.
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05.15.21

Saturday Selects

Week of May 10, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: table lamps inspired by fancy birds, chairs just begging us to shake a leg, and wishlist-worthy wooden spoons.
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05.13.21

Sighted

A New Collection of Expressive Rugs Channels Art Deco and the Swedish Grace Movement

The 1920s were a great decade for Swedish design and architecture, birthing the short-lived Swedish Grace movement, which combined the decorative expressiveness of Art Deco and Neo-classicism with a signature Scandinavian restraint. They were also a great decade for rugs, as talents like Eileen Gray, artist Fernand Léger, and soon-to-be-artist Francis Bacon adorned floors with vibrant geometric compositions. A new collection from the Swedish company Nordic Knots, called Art Deco, channels that magical moment in time, with three rug designs that take inspiration from the period’s ethos, shapes, and colors.
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05.12.21

Up and Coming

The Old is New in Gippeum Roh’s Still Life–Inspired Paintings and Ceramics

Gippeum Roh’s paintings have the flattened perspective of Cézanne’s apples, the muted color palette and tight interlocking composition of a Giorgio Morandi still life, and a hint of the sensuousness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and landscapes. Asked about the source of her visual repertoire, Roh says, “My painting is about the everyday things that I bring to my studio. I collect things and place them, just as in the long tradition of still life painting. Light and shadow; natural, cool or warm light play an important role in revealing the appearance and essence of objects.”
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Frieze Art Fair 2021
05.11.21

Fair Report

Our 15 Favorite Artists From This Year’s Hybrid Frieze Art Fair

In my ideal, art-through-a-design-lens, pandemic-less world, Frieze — and other fairs like it — would show a more equitable mix of two- and three-dimensional works, the artists themselves would be on-hand to speak about their process, and we would all be taking a gloriously sunny ferry to Randall's Island instead of hanging out in the shadow of a failed mall in Hudson Yards. That said, there was plenty to like about this year's fair.
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05.10.21

Q+A

Caroline Denervaud’s Paintings Are a Dialogue Between Art and Dance

It was French artist Yves Klein who, in 1960, first used women’s bodies as canvases, covering them in blue paint to study the impressions they made on paper, while an orchestra played on. Swiss-born multi-disciplinary artist Caroline Denervaud’s vibrant, abstract artworks recall Klein's pioneering performative work, and also comprise the emotionally raw, humanistic approach to movement as seen in the works of visionary German dance choreographer Pina Bausch. “She was the first person who inspired me,” recalls Denervaud.
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05.08.21

Saturday Selects

Week of May 3, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a French midcentury–inspired furniture collection by fashion designer Christian Siriano, an extremely good entrant to our mental "cool flatware" list, and the Instagram-famous sofa reissue we've all been waiting for.
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05.06.21

Graphic Design

A New Identity For an Australian Designer, and Other Graphic Design Picks For May

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: culture-driven visuals for a Brooklyn menswear brand, a website for a tribute album to a famed Russian Poet, and a flexible graphic identity for an Australian multi-disciplinary designer (above).
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Soft Baroque Sun City
05.05.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Blistered Leather and Melted Aluminum — Soft Baroque’s New Works Were Inspired By the Sun

After a year of pretty much everything being on hold, we’re finally seeing the fruits of some of that pre-COVID labor. For those of us here in Milan, that means projects originally slated for the canceled 2020 Design Week are at last seeing the light of day. One of the better projects to have made it out the other side is Sun City, a collaboration between PIN-UP magazine, Soft Baroque, and Marséll, the Milanese footwear brand. Set over three levels in Marséll’s headquarters in an ex-factory in the Porta Romana district, Soft Baroque debuted — during the Digital Design Days in April — a slew of new work, each piece loosely inspired by the sun.
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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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