Sarah Sherman Samuel Moved to “Furniture City” and — Lo and Behold — Self-Produced a Furniture Collection

Moving back to Michigan from Los Angeles four years ago might’ve been the best decision Sarah Sherman Samuel ever made. As well as offering her family heaps more room, the in-demand interior designer — who has shot to fame over the last few years with high-profile interiors for the likes of Mandy Moore, Vanessa Carlton, and Garance Doré — has been able to set up a new office and showroom in Grand Rapids, nicknamed Furniture City for the amount of manufacturers based there, and reconnect with her childhood nostalgia of exploring the woods and lake shore. Returning to this landscape was also the driving force behind the SSS Atelier collection, the first that her studio has both designed and produced in-house, now that she has the space and resources to do so.

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04.17.14

Studio Visit

Sally England, Fiber Artist

Until recently, you couldn’t hear the word “macramé” without it conjuring up visions of thrift-store place mats, summer camp friendship bracelets, and Mama Cass’s bolero vests. But thanks in part to Sally England, the masterful, Michigan-based, macramé artist who has made distinctly modern, large-scale commissions for the likes of Nike and Ace Hotels, the once nostalgic medium is having another day in the sun.

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11.26.13

Sighted

George Nelson’s Kirkpatrick House on WHY

It’s hard to say, looking at the image above —with its freestanding kiln-like fireplace, its red-palette Persian rug, and its chic indoor garden — whether the interior featured is genuinely vintage or simply one of the excellent contemporary facsimiles that populate board after Pinterest board these days. But in some ways, that’s precisely the point. The interior above, featured this week on Herman Miller’s excellent WHY blog, was designed in the 1950s by George Nelson, and like many of Nelson’s designs, it is as usable and contemporary today as it was half a century ago.

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11.22.13

The Making of

Material Material, by Doug Johnston & Debbie Carlos

The practice of two artists collaborating by mail is nothing new; after all, that’s how Peter Shire communicated ideas to his Memphis colleagues back in 1980s Milan and how Alex Segreti and Kelly Rakowski of New Friends got their start (with the former in Philly and the latter in New York.) But what happens when you elevate that practice to something more like a parlor game? We here at Sight Unseen had been wondering that ourselves, which is why we were especially tickled when we found out that Debbie Carlos and Doug Johnston — two of our favorites — had recently happened upon the exact same idea.

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07.01.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Jesse Moretti at Mondo Cane

A few weeks ago, someone on our Facebook page coined the term "zigzag expressionism" to describe the current prevailing aesthetic in art and graphic design. At the time, we laughed, gave the comment a thumbs up, and moved on. But in the weeks since, the phrase has stuck with us — and never more so than when we caught a glimpse on Instagram of the work of recent Cranbrook MFA grad Jesse Moretti, on view now at Mondo Cane gallery in New York. What we like about this phrase in general is its laughable obviousness, but in the context of Moretti's work it actually does describe not only a visual language but a thematic one as well.

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06.27.13

Studio Visit

Matthew Shlian, Paper Engineer

Knowing what we do about Matthew Shlian, it’s hard to believe that the Ann Arbor, Michigan–based artist ever thought he wanted to be a ceramicist. Ceramics is a medium of imprecision and risk, full of frequent failure and a high degree of unknowability. Shlian, on the other hand, can be found these days doing one of three things, each of which requires an almost uncanny amount of precision: drumming; working with scientists at the University of Michigan using paper to visualize structures at the micro and nano scales; or folding and gluing paper into intricate sculptures that range from 11x11-inch editions for Ghostly International to an 8-foot installation in the window of a New York Levi’s flagship. “I’ve always loved geometry,” Shlian says. “I understand spatial relations and I can envision the leap from 2D to 3D pretty easily. That kind of led the way to paper, and paper became the medium by which to execute a lot of my ideas.”

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