These Mysterious Glass Assemblages, On View at Marta, Were Inspired By Modernist Buildings and Corporate Architecture

Over the years, Jonah Takagi has worked with all kinds of materials, but it's glass that has preoccupied him throughout five summer residencies in the south of France, at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Center, or CIRVA, in Marseilles. For Takagi, the experience yielded not only an unexpected love for Marseilles but also an ever-evolving series of mesmerizing angular vessels that reference, in their shape and in their texture, the Brutalist architecture of Kenzo Tange or Le Corbusier. His latest selection, a series of dusky, painterly assemblages, is on view through April 22 at Marta gallery in Los Angeles in a solo show called "Brut Vessels."

04.07.15

Sighted

Forma Anticum

Part of the joy we take in creating content for Sight Unseen every day is the delight we get from telling the stories behind the makers and the images we publish. But what happens when there is literally no story to be found? That's exactly the position we found ourselves in the other day when we stumbled across these images on Pinterest.

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.

02.04.15

Up and Coming

Ferris McGuinty, Artist

If you go looking on the internet for information about a Cornwall-based maker named Ferris McGuinty, chances are you won't find much. Yes, McGuinty is on the younger side (we were born in the same year, so at least that's what I'm telling myself) but even more than that: Ferris McGuinty didn't exist until 2009. The name was merely a pseudonym the artist took on to allow himself the freedom to make work that was unlike anything he'd done before. Having graduated from art school in the early 2000s, McGuinty previously made work that was smaller in scale, tiny, almost architectural-like models. As a respite from that, he began gathering found objects — "I'm quite a prolific hoarder," he says proudly — and marrying them with elements of his own creation to make the kind of assemblage objects you see at the top of this post. "Ferris came about because because the work really had that day-off vibe. McGuinty somehow naturally followed suit. But it allowed me a sense of detachment from my own work. I could be much more playful and not worried about what direction it went in."

03.13.13

Sighted

New Work by David Taylor

In case you hadn’t noticed, the big trend in these leaner, post–economic disaster days, has been to elevate the lowest of low-grade materials into something elegant by design. OSB, polystyrene, plywood, plastic, MDF, resin — the list is endless. But you’d be hard pressed to think of a designer who does the opposite, who purposefully debases the precious commodity he’s been trained to craft to perfection. And yet what other choice did David Taylor have? After graduating from Konstfack in 1999, the Stockholm-based silversmith began to see the price of his raw materials soar: “Silver simply became too expensive for me to work with,” he says. “Without the benefit of a commission, working on spec becomes impossible when silver has quadrupled in price over the last eight years.” But Taylor’s loss was our gain: The designer began dabbling a few years ago in what he calls “a cheaper neighborhood,” making object assemblages by grafting more inexpensive materials like concrete, brass, and steel onto smaller silver pieces.