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10.15.21

Travel

Three New Design Hotels With Interiors We’d Love to Get Cozy in This Fall

Fall is the best time to enjoy the coziness of having a coffee or a cocktail in a warm, well-designed, moodily lit hotel lobby or bar. If we weren't going to be spending ours finishing up the first Sight Unseen book, we'd be checking into one of these three new properties and settling in with a martini and a good book. As a bonus, they marry the sustainability of using vintage furnishings with the social responsibility of sourcing from local artists. Tour Kanalhuset, the Hotel Grand Stark, and the Alsace LA after the jump.
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09.24.19

Sight Unseen Presents

Three Designers Turned Their Hotel Rooms Into Studios for A Weekend Residency — Here are the Results

With the help of the design-forward travel app HotelTonight — which allows designers to choose from a curated selection of hotels that might drive creative inspiration — we issued a challenge to three designers: Spend a weekend in a city you've never been to, bringing with you only the tools you can fit into a carry-on, and use your hotel room as a mobile studio in which to create a design object inspired by your travels.
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01.15.19

Eye Candy

A New Ceramics Collection Wants to Sand Down the Edges of Brutalism

Founded by Orion Janeczek, a graphic designer and stylist from Portland, Oregon, New Material's first collection is called Brutalism for Lovers — i.e. thick slabs made cuddly in the form of footed trays and planters, tubetop vases, and a dinnerware set that are all sorts of chunky, cute, and slightly absurd.
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Nationale Portland gallery
03.23.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Portland Gallery Has Shown Only Female Artists Since the Beginning of 2017

Nationale is an art gallery in Portland, Oregon that represents eight emerging artists: four male, and four female. But since the beginning of 2017, the gallery has shown three female artists in quick succession — Amy Bernstein, a painter; Francesca Capone, a textile artist; and Emily Counts, a sculptor; whose work is everything we look for in a Sight Unseen subject — colorful, multidisciplinary, and meaningful. And while directors May Barruel and Gabi Lewton-Leopold swear that the suddenly gendered roster wasn't purposeful, it certainly feels refreshing in the current climate.
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09.10.15

Up and Coming

Portland Artist Drew Tyndell

Portland-based Drew Tyndell is the creative director of his own studio, Computer Team, which specializes in 2D hand-drawn and stop-motion animations. But he’s also an accomplished artist in the more traditional sense of the word, and his most recent project is a commissioned mural for Dolby’s new headquarters in San Francisco.
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06.16.15

Studio Visit

Portland Textile Artist Kayla Mattes

Kayla Mattes’ tapestries are an antidote to the disconnection and depersonalization that spending hours online can sometimes leave you feeling. Her work is plugged in to all the technology we take for granted but she recontextualizes it, slows it down, and the effect is immersive, dizzying, a little chaotic, and oddly comforting.
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04.29.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

The New Frontier at Bellevue Arts Museum

When we were first introduced to the multi-talented photographer Charlie Schuck, a good three years ago, he was running the heart-stoppingly chic concept store Object in Seattle, at which he paired things like Masanori Oji trivets with pieces he commissioned from local studios like Iacoli & McAllister and Grain. It was the first, most beautifully executed sign that a larger narrative was galvanizing around Pacific Northwest designers — one that reaches its apex this month with a museum show Schuck has curated for the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington.
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12.16.14

Up and Coming

Matthew Philip Williams, Furniture Designer

The first work we ever knew from Portland, Oregon–based furniture designer Matthew Philip Williams was a collection he calls The Step-Family. The pieces, which were designed individually but at the same time, include a pinchpot mug in Yves Klein blue, a laminate and maple bench, and a steel and Douglas fir coat rack. The items are so aggressively functional — and make use of such logical and simple material choices — that you would never guess that Williams’s first inclination was to be a fine artist.
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04.18.13

Up and Coming

Jason Rens, Furniture Designer

Jason Rens’s future as a designer pretty much began — though unbeknownst to him at the time — the day his grandpa bought him a Taliesin West t-shirt. Rens was still a kid growing up in Arizona, and his grandpa, Al Farnsworth, was an architect who liked to make pilgrimages to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed winter home each time he came to visit. When Rens grew up and graduated high school, he worked at a clothing company slash record label for awhile, but then a random job at a design/build company activated some long-dormant impulse buried inside him: I want to be an architect, too. He made it halfway through architecture school in Boulder before shifting gears and finishing his degree in crafts in Portland, where he’s now known for both his interiors and, increasingly, his Rason Jens line of sculptural objects.
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02.12.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Alley-Oop by Will Bryant and Eric Trine at Poketo

Before the show Alley-Oop opens at L.A.'s Poketo store this coming Saturday, you should take a moment to thoroughly examine the portfolios of its two Portland-based collaborators, illustrator Will Bryant and furniture designer Eric Trine. Because think about it: How easy is it to picture the results of a collaboration spanning the two disciplines? Especially when Bryant's work is so crazy vibrant — full of squiggles and anthropomorphized hot dogs wearing neon sunglasses — and Trine's is so very understated, albeit with a lot of cool geometries in the mix. Alley-Oop is like one of those software programs that lets you crudely merge the faces of two people to find out what their child might look like at age 5, though perhaps a better metaphor would be that it's like what would happen if you pumped two designers full of methamphetamine and locked them in a room together for 48 hours with nothing but some spray paint and a welding gun. Actually, that's not too far off from how Bryant and Trine describe it themselves. See our interview with the pair after the jump, along with the first preview images of their collaborative work — which hopefully won't be the last.
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