03.01.21

Q+A

James Shaw On Why He Hopes His Design Practice Will One Day Eat Itself

“Daffodils are great,” says British designer James Shaw when I point out the bright yellow bunch sitting behind him in his southeast London workshop during our Zoom call. “They always start off really unpromising as those little green buds, and then they get better and better and they last for ages.” It’s an apt metaphor for Shaw’s own work, which often begins as discarded post-consumer plastic that he turns into slightly trippy organic forms reminiscent of crude cake frosting, created with his self-built plastic extruding gun and sculpted into quotidian objects from toilet paper holders to bowls, candelabras, and chairs.
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02.27.21

Saturday Selects

Week of February 22, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, two wooden, wavy moments, a pair of brightly optimistic gallery exhibitions, and a whole slew of mood-lifting lighting designs.
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02.24.21

Up and Coming

Travertine, Salt, and Wood: Gregory Beson and the Beauty of Tangible Materials

There’s something refreshingly thoughtful about the way New York–based furniture designer and Parsons professor Gregory Beson talks about his practice. He may be represented by Love House in New York and Rossana Orlandi in Milan, but when discussing his recent collection, Home Group One, it’s not some white-gloved gallery where he pictures it. “I see the pieces as plinths for living,” says the Massachusetts-born designer, describing the series of tables, chairs, and shelving formed of interlocking planes of solid walnut.
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06.24.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition Asks: Can Digital Representations Eclipse the Experience of Physical Objects?

Soft Baroque's "World of Ulteriors" exhibition at Étage Projects in Copenhagen, which closes this week, features many items that are simply variations on the duo's existing work. The new conceit here is the way in which these items are presented: In each vignette, a collection of furniture sits atop a curved, zero-horizon backdrop — something akin to a seamless, but here depicting a fictional interior that's completed by Soft Baroque's domestic objects.
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02.22.21

Excerpt: Book

Ken Miller’s New Book Pictures Photography Anew

A new volume by editor and curator Ken Miller celebrates photography not for the referential images it can capture, but for the possibilities of the medium in and of itself. Titled PICTURES, the book celebrates non-representational photography, and it’s a formal announcement of sorts that photographs, as an art form, have come into a category all their own and not just in service of documentation, representation, or narrative.
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02.20.21

Saturday Selects

Week of February 15, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Disneyland-inspired renovation, Gaudí-inspired floor lamps, and a can't-miss wallpaper collaboration by a dream duo.
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caine heintzman andlight vancouver
02.18.21

Q+A

This Canadian Designer is Leading the Charge — No Pun Intended — to Prove Lighting Can Be Both Efficient and Beautiful

Caine Heintzman’s designs are among the most expressive produced by his company, ANDLight; you've surely seen his Vine light, which can only be described by the contemporary term "chonky," hanging in places like the Pieces Home in Kennebunk, Maine. But in fact, Heintzman's designs are typically inspired by hardy, everyday industrial objects. He designs in a modular way so that his products can exist singularly or be grouped and customized for various spaces and projects, and evolve far into the future.
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02.17.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Garance Vallée Paintings and Totems Are Familiar But Surreal

For her inaugural American exhibition this month at Carvalho Park in Brooklyn, Garance Vallée was meant to create a holistic environment, working with fabricators in the neighborhood to create a kind of set design that would encompass her new paintings, which are on view for the first time. That plan, of course, was scrapped when COVID hit, and Vallée scaled down her ambitions to that which could be fabricated in her own live/work space in Paris, then shipped in a crate to New York. In some ways, however, being forced to reckon with her own surroundings is part of the point of the exhibition.
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02.13.21

Saturday Selects

Week of February 8, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: avant-garde chairs designed by third-graders, a fresh look at classic Verner Panton furniture, and a peek into the Manhattan studio of Giancarlo Valle.
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