At The Future Perfect, Bec Brittain’s SHY Lights Grow Up

Bec Brittain has been playing with different configurations of her constellation-like SHY Lights ever since they debuted all the way back in 2012. But because each light is constricted only by the width and length of an LED tube, as well as Brittain's own boundless imagination, the possibilities are quite literally endless. So for a new show at The Future Perfect, called Resolute, Brittain began experimenting with the path and quality of the light source itself rather than the configuration of the tubes.

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Field Experiments Fisher Parrish Gallery

11.09.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Bricks, Rubber, Concrete, and Stone: Field Experiments’ New Collection is Made From the Building Blocks of NYC

When Benjamin Harrison Bryant, Paul Marcus Fuog, and Karim Charlebois-Zariffa founded Field Experiments in 2013, they were inspired by the prospect of venturing to an exotic locale, removing themselves from their daily lives, and having that new place inform their work. But in their latest venture — a show at Brooklyn’s Fisher Parrish gallery on view through December 17 — the terrain has shifted to the familiar: New York City.

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Calico Wallpaper's Red Hook Loft: A Brooklyn Home Tour

09.20.16

At Home With

Calico Wallpaper’s Envy-Inducing Airy Red Hook Loft

In hindsight, it feels almost like fate that Nick and Rachel Cope would end up in the sprawling, historic Red Hook loft they now call home. After all, where else in New York City could they have found the room to showcase not one but six of the wallpaper collections they've created since 2012 as partners in the Brooklyn-based Calico?

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02.10.16

Studio Visit

Playing Around With the Cool Kids of American Design

Inside the experimental playground that is Ladies & Gentlemen's new Brooklyn studio: “All of our work is an evolution of itself,” says Dylan Davis, one-half of the up-and-coming design couple. Shapes on a piece of jewelry might lead to a geometric take on lighting; that, in turn, might inspire the assorted forms suspended on a mobile. However distinct, each piece is unmistakably linked to the next, joined by an understated elegance and what the two refer to as "playful austerity." “We try to embrace that feeling you had as a kid when you got to really explore,” Davis says. “Our goal is to take that spirit of play and figure out how to use it professionally.”

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07.16.13

8 Things

Jonathan Nesci, Furniture Designer

When Jonathan Nesci was 23 — with a one-year-old at home, and working as a forklift operator at FedEx in Chicago while attending night school for 3-D drafting at a community college — one of his coworkers gave him a fateful nudge: “He knew I wanted to design furniture, and he was like, ‘You can do it!!’,” recalls Nesci, now 31. And so he cold-emailed Richard Wright, founder of the eponymous Chicago auction house, and promoted the heck out of himself until he landed a job managing Wright’s restoration department, where he stayed for five years before founding his own studio in early 2012. As he tells it, his cheerleader at FedEx deserves substantial credit for inspiring him to take the leap that changed his life. But to know Nesci is to realize that no matter what happened, the results would have been the same — he was destined to be a designer.

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04.30.10

Up and Coming

Jonah Takagi, furniture designer

Jonah Takagi claims he has ADD, and he may be right. Since graduating from RISD in 2002, the Japanese-born, New England–bred, Washington D.C.–based designer has worked as a cabinetmaker, a full-time musician, a set builder for National Geographic docudramas, and a producer for an indie-rock kids’ show called Pancake Mountain. In the weeks leading up to this story, we talked about skinned cats, prosthetic kidneys, and smoking pot out of an art-school professor’s peg leg. But Takagi’s work is anything but schizophrenic.

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