05.29.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Oyyo’s New Swedish Flat-Weaves Are a Master Class on the Reuse of Leftover Yarns

For Oyyo's new series, Landing Site Irregular, the focus was on the reuse of leftover dyed yarns to create experimental compositions in custom colors, such as vibrant-azure blue and light tangerine. Smaller in size than their original offerings, these rugs breathe new life into the yarn, but the geometric underpinnings remain, inspired by visionary architects and artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s theories on space and color.
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05.28.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Book on Chromophobia Inspired Estudio Persona’s Most Colorful Collection Yet

Born of an investigation of volumes and building principles and marking Estudio Persona's first foray into color, the pieces in their Connection Collection — such as the Block chair, a low-slung lounge upholstered in rust-colored mohair — are meant to elicit a new perspective on their surroundings. Of course, as soon as the collection was ready to be shipped across the country and shown, the country went on lockdown.
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05.28.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Meditation, Tattoos, American Shaker and French Country All Come Together in Nicholas Hamilton Holmes’s Oxalino Collection

There’s no post-modern software used in the making of Nicholas Hamilton Holmes’s new furniture collection, OXALINO; no industrial techniques. But what is required is a steady hand, a steady heart, a steady breath — and some vinegar. Made in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, OXALINO is a collection of furniture and one-of-a-kind objects with thin stripes — hand-painted with an oxidizing solution — spiraling continuously around their solid wood forms.
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05.27.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Lambert & Fils’ New Collection Was Inspired By Airport Floodlights and Vintage French Mopeds

Riding high on the buzz from their installation at last year’s Salone del Mobile, Lambert & Fils had planned to open their first New York showroom and launch a monograph detailing the brand’s first 10 years. But, as we are all well aware, the universe had other ideas. With their grand plans shifted to the back burner, the studio is instead focusing their energy in a new direction: Expanding the Dorval lighting system, which was first unveiled in 2018 in collaboration with Paris-based SCMP Design Office.
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Atelier de Troupe Offsite Online
05.26.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Atelier de Troupe’s Latest Collection is the Sun and Sand Infusion We Need Right Now

Gabriel Abraham is nostalgic: for childhood summers spent between the rocks of Cassis and the beaches of St. Tropez, for glass bottles found washed up on the beach, maybe even for squinting up at a sun that shines a little less harshly. His reveries are made manifest in Dérive D'Été, Atelier de Troupe’s new collection of lighting and furniture, inspired at turns by “drifting tides, the cyclical shades of light, and the long shadows of summer.”
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07.09.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Woven, Color-Field Canvases Look Almost Like Paintings

Brooklyn artist Ethan Cook is sometimes referred to as a painter, but we've yet to find an instance of him actually putting a brush to canvas. When we first started following Cook's work, after an introduction in 2012 from Iko Iko in Los Angeles, he was manipulating canvases by way of bleaching and dyeing the fibers; he then moved on to combining hand-woven canvases with store-bought ones in a kind of super high-end, abstract patchwork. His work for the past few years, though, has involved making large-scale woven pieces entirely by hand on a four-harness floor loom — our favorite iteration yet.
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05.25.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Christopher Norman is Turning the Castoff Urban Trees of Los Angeles Into Art

Los Angeles–based architect and designer Christopher Norman’s new collection of hand-machined minimal forms resists standardization. His untitled “extrusions” in ash and cedar and pine riff on a hardware aesthetic, while maintaining the organic ethos seen in much of his other, more fluidly-shaped work. Forgoing pre-cut lumber, Norman uses wood from freshly cut trees. “If you’re working with commercial wood, you get a very normalized look and set of proportions. It’s basically highly mediated,” he explains.
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05.23.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

From Lava Stone to Hempcrete: The First of Our Offsite Selects Round-Ups

Ever since we began hosting our Sight Unseen Offsite fair, it has always featured both full collection launches as well as a more gallery-like section called Selects, the latter meant to highlight only a piece or two each by a large, diverse group of designers. Now that our physical show has become Offsite Online, we’ve kept the Selects concept in tact, and we’re presenting those individual works in roundups on our main feed over the next three Saturdays. View the first one here.
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05.22.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

JUMBO’s Founders on the Science of Cuteness — And Why They’re Endlessly Inspired By the Emoji

Trained as architects, Donnelly and Lee design objects that seem seamless, almost immaterial, just arrangements of color and form. Working in this gap between representation and object could be no less prescient — as if we weren’t experiencing much of the world mediated by screens already, social distancing due to the pandemic has only increased our reliance on digital intermediaries.
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Supaform Offsite Online
05.21.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Supaform’s New Collection Goes Neutral, Removing What He Calls the “Fancy Husk” of Color

Supaform’s latest collection — a shelf, chair, coffee table, bench, and lamp called Fancy-Routine and debuting at Offsite Online — possess similar characteristics to those in his imagined renderings: clean, curvy lines; off-kilter forms; and a resistance to revealing how exactly they come together. Composed of what he calls "rusty metal", Maxim Scherbakov says his starting point for the collection was the idea of degradation — how even a shiny chrome surface can be eaten away if it’s left long enough.
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Tantuvi Travertine Collection Offsite Online
05.20.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Tantuvi’s New Rugs Were Inspired By the Travertine Quarries of India and the Spanish Steps of Rome

On car journeys throughout India, Tantuvi's founder Arati Rao and Adam Sipe often pass through cities and villages set against a dramatic landscape of marble and quartz quarries, mountains, sand dunes, magical desert lakes, and jungles. “The sandstone color that permeates all these landscapes is always on my mind,” Rao says. “Travertine quarries are all over the region and the earth changes from beige to ochre then deep ruby as you move throughout.” These colors were the inspiration behind Tantuvi’s latest collection, fittingly called Travertine.
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BZIPPY Offsite Online
05.19.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

BZIPPY’s Outsized Ceramic Works Are the Statement in the Room — Not the Accent

If you’re lucky enough to ever see one of LA-based artist and sculptor Bari Ziperstein’s outsized ceramic works in person, the combination of scale, texture, and hue might stop you in your tracks. Her design studio, BZIPPY, creates striking, often Brutalist-inspired ceramic vases, lamps, and furniture, while within her complementary fine art practice, Ziperstein has been known to explore meticulously manicured fingers, dimensionality, or the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda. With her robust dual practice, Ziperstein welcomes decorative ceramics into the fine art conversation, and vice versa.
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