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03.19.15

Studio Visit

Nous Vous, Graphic Artists

“It’s about making language visual,” respond the three members of Nous Vous when I ask them about their distinctly French name, which translates to We, You. “Well, it rolls off the tongue nicely, too,” laughs Jay Cover, who founded the London-based trio with William Edmonds and Nicolas Burrows back in 2007. “But aside from that, our external influences tend to be design manifestos where the process is conscious of the audience and collaboration.” We, You — there is a certain anonymity to their practice, reflected also in their European website domain (nousvous.eu), placing the group nowhere specific, perhaps in an effort to avoid defining their collective body of work.
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03.13.15

Sighted

Ivin Ballen, Artist

We love an artist who can successfully blur the line between sculpture and painting, and Brooklyn-based Ivin Ballen is certainly no exception. Upon first viewing his work, you perceive a few colored shapes (some rectilinear, others more organic) haphazardly arranged on a vast backdrop. Upon closer inspection, you begin to notice those colored shapes are an assemblage of found materials, and that, in fact, those found materials are simply just painted casts of the originals.
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03.07.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 1, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A glimpse into the past (the three-year-old side table, pictured above, we can't believe we overlooked), present (six can't-miss art exhibitions happening now), and future (four pieces launching in Milan next month).
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03.05.15

Sighted

Still Lifes by Belgian Photographer Frederik Vercruysse

Still life photography is having a big week on Sight Unseen — yesterday we featured a pair of stylists who built their reputation on it and are now moving into interiors, and today we're highlighting a photographer who approaches shooting interiors just as though they were still lifes. Belgian-born talent Frederik Vercruysse, in fact, describes his entire body of work as "still life photography in the broadest sense of the word," according to his website, applying the approach not just to interiors but to portraits, fashion shows, and the occasional landscape as well (for clients like Wallpaper magazine, Sophie Buhai, and Muller Van Severen). But then, of course, there are his actual still lifes, which we've decided to focus on here. Shot mostly for magazines, they represent the purest form of his aim "to photograph the subject in its purest form."
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02.26.15

Studio Visit

Cave Collective, Artists

We discovered Cave Collective by way of their jewelry, which we spotted at the boutique No. 6 in New York, this past October. In late November, we shot founders Cat Lauigan and Alex Wolkowicz in their Greenpoint workspace. Then, by the end of January, we found out that they'd dismantled most of the studio and jewelry line, that Lauigan had relocated to California, and that both artists were focusing on their individual practices until they figured out what to do next. And yet by that point, we knew enough about Cave Collective to take the news in stride — ever since Lauigan and Wolkowicz began their collaboration in 2010, it's been an endlessly shape-shifting and exploratory project, one that's seen them living thousands of miles apart for nearly as long as they've lived in the same city.
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02.25.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Barbara Kasten at the ICA Philadelphia

If Barbara Kasten’s colorful, angular compositions look as though they could have been arranged just last week by some prop stylist in Los Angeles — well, consider that a testament to Kasten’s massive, if massively underappreciated, influence. The Chicago-based artist and photographer is currently the subject of a long overdue solo exhibition at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art; Stages spans five decades of work, from fiber sculptures to cyanotype prints to set design to a brand-new, site-specific installation that plays beautifully with the ICA’s interior architecture.
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02.24.15

Up and Coming

Meet the Baltimore-Based Artist Making Abstract Art from Yoga Mats

Balance balls, dumbbells, pool noodles — is the recent incorporation of exercise equipment into the visual arts part and parcel with normcore or is it something more? The latest adherent to the trend is Baltimore-based artist Alex Ebstein, who works with a variety of materials — most notably yoga mats — but in Ebstein's hands, those basic materials become less trendy and more textural. Her brightly colored canvases resemble something Matisse may have constructed had his cut-out phase occurred during the Memphis movement.
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02.21.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 16, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two new designs by American Design Hot List alums, a solo show by a master of Mono-ha, and various accoutrements for the chicest breakfast table ever, including marble egg cups and this epic speckled pitcher by BTW Ceramics.
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02.16.15

Sighted

Valentin Dommanget, Artist

Like most visually inclined folks his age, 25-year-old French artist Valentin Dommanget — who studied fashion as an undergrad before receiving his MFA at Central Saint Martins last spring — grew up with a steady diet of internet art. Having internalized a certain digital aesthetic that embraces all things geological and hypercolor, natural yet unnatural, he created a series of paintings that take those virtual influences and represent them through actual real-world handicraft, pairing paint-marbled canvases with torqued stretchers that mimic some kind of Photoshop rotation effect. Pictured above and below are selections from that series, plus other pieces that apply the same techniques to concrete tables, paper books, framed canvases, and crooked canvases that appear balanced atop geometric plywood cutouts.
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02.14.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 9, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, the humble accent table takes on many forms: an iridescent I-beam, a rug-wrapped hexagon, and a charred-wood square with a hairy interior void.
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02.13.15

Current Obsession

Andrew O. Hughes on DeWain Valentine

Our first-ever From the Archives post, which looked back at William Sklaroff's mid-century desk accessory set Radius One, dates back to November 10, 2009 — the very first day of Sight Unseen's existence. But after that, the column pretty much petered out, partly because we didn't have the time to research it properly and partly because, with millions upon millions of wonderful old things to potentially highlight, how could we ever choose just one? We've officially solved that problem today with the launch of our new and improved From the Archives series, in which designers and artists will do all the work for us: Each edition will invite a talent we admire to give a little history lesson on someone from the past who's had a strong impact on their work. Our first subject is Brooklyn glassmaker Andrew O. Hughes, speaking about the California Light and Space sculptor DeWain Valentine (no holiday-themed pun intended).
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02.07.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 2, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two groundbreakingly gorgeous ways to hang your clothes, two making-of videos featuring Misha Kahn and Rafael de Cardenas, and two of the hottest Mexican talents to come out of the Zona Maco art show.
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