Ellsworth Kelly–Inspired Sculptures in Metal and Glass, By Two of Seattle’s Best Designers

The last time Jamie Iacoli teamed up with glass artist John Hogan, in 2014, it was for a series of lamps and tables released under the banner of Iacoli & McAllister, the Seattle-based furniture company she was running at the time with fellow designer Brian McAllister. Iacoli’s second collaboration with Hogan — three large tabletop sculptures that launched this past May at the Finnish fashion brand Samuji’s Soho flagship — features a similar metal-meets-glass construction, yet nearly everything else has changed.
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Faris Du Graf on What It Took to Create Seattle’s Newest Fashion Mecca

As if helming their own fashion brands wasn't enough, Faris Du Graf of the jewelry line Faris and Deborah Roberts of the clothing line Silvae banded together this fall to open RIZOM, a huge, airy retail destination in Seattle where they sell not only their own work, but the work of other independent designers. We spoke with Du Graf about the challenges and the joys of her newest endeavor, and the business advice she'd give other budding design or fashion entrepreneurs.
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Iacoli & McAllister

Iacoli & McAllister’s New Collection is a Stellar Evolution

Sometimes, the stars align and you get this: a collaboration between one of our favorite furniture designers (Iacoli & McAllister), the most inventive glass artist we know (John Hogan), and a photographer who's quickly becoming the design world's ace in the hole (Charlie Schuck). But in this case, those stars are literal as well as metaphorical: The new collections shown here today by Iacoli & McAllister are named after specific stars in the zodiac constellations.
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Ria Leigh’s Pottery Is Part Ancient, Part Avant-Garde

So much of the neo-ceramics movement over the past few years has focused on the medium's graphic aspects — how to slab-build the most intricate geometric shapes, or how to apply the most avant-garde patterning — that it's sometimes easy to forget just how primordial and organic a process creating pottery really is. Ria Leigh, a Seattle-based ceramicist who also works in textiles and painting, somehow makes work that easily straddles the two aesthetics.
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Seattle design studio Grain

An Experimental Collection by a Studio at the Forefront of Seattle’s Design Scene

For their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain has been known to travel far and wide, working primarily with women artisans in Guatemala — after all, that's where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But for their newest collection, the two stuck a bit closer to home: a rug woven by a textile mill near their alma mater, RISD; wooden trays and benches made in their Bainbridge Island studio; bottle openers cast in a Pacific Northwest foundry; and a glass series made in collaboration with John Hogan.
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Justine Ashbee of Native Line

Justine Ashbee is one of those talents we've been circling around for years — first coveting a fine, copper-threaded special-edition light she did with Iacoli & McAllister, then ogling her beautiful wall hangings in stories like our own home tour with Totokaelo's Jill Wenger and outlets like Maryam Nassir Zadeh. But we've never had a proper introduction to the onetime Seattle-based artist — now living in Brighton, England — until today.
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Q+Q’s 2015 Collection, Shot by Amanda Ringstad

When we first invited one of our favorite prop stylists, Seattle's Amanda Ringstad, to create a shoot around Q+Q's line of waterproof, solar-powered watches last year, she attempted to abstract the simple, color-blocked designs into ambiguous shapes and arrangements. For its 2015 collection, however, the Japanese brand — who partnered with us for a second time at this year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE — went wild with pattern, so we thought it would be especially compelling to return to Ringstad once again and see how that might change her aesthetic approach. The result is a series of playful, summery images shot inside a big bucket of water that imagine the watches as eye-catchingly outfitted, anthropomorphized bathers.
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Aleksandra Pollner, Furniture Designer

After her family bribed their way out of Poland in the ’80s, says Aleksandra Pollner, they spent years moving from place to place to place. Her perpetually uprooted childhood, she says, had a profound effect on her work as an adult: “I became fascinated with boundaries, tensions, spaces in between, where we find solace, and what makes us feel comfort and discomfort,” concepts that inspired pieces like her new Line and Circle table and Ma floor light, pictured above.
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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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Q+Q Watches Shot By Amanda Ringstad

When Amanda Ringstad showed a friend recently one of the images she'd styled and shot for us of a cluster of Q+Q SmileSolar watches, all linked together in a random shape, her friend's first reaction was: "That looks like a lawnmower!" Ringstad was thoroughly pleased — having been invited by us to apply her styling genius in the service of our friends at Q+Q, who partnered with us on this year's edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE, the Seattle photographer's main objective was to present the watches in a simple, abstracted way that left plenty of room for the imagination. "Watches are a simple thing, but difficult to disassociate so that they convey something else," she explains. After initial attempts to weave them together into a kind of "textile," or arrange them on top of summery backgrounds depicting water or sand, in the end Ringstad used spare colored planes and graphic shadows to elevate her subjects above the realm of mere utilitarian objects.
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