Comprising four days, 12,000 square feet, and 50-something exhibitors, Sight Unseen OFFSITE is a major undertaking — a Herculean one, in fact, if you consider that there are only two of us leading the entire operation. So when we announced in April that we were doing an additional show this year, at the Collective Design fair, people quite understandably looked at us like we’d lost our minds. And yet we persisted on the sheer force of our belief that Steven Learner and his team at Collective are doing great things for design, things we wanted to be a part of — not just providing a platform for some of the world’s most important design galleries to sell to clients, but attempting to widen the dialogue with special projects like (this year) on-site design performances by The American Design Club, a Nap Lab by Various Projects and Print All Over Me, installations by OS & OOS and Jonathan Nesci, and of course, an offer to let us curate a corollary to Sight Unseen OFFSITE that featured six up-and-coming American designers making gallery-level work. If you didn’t get the chance to see last week’s Collective Design fair, which welcomed more than 10,000 visitors, here’s our best of show — and stay tuned for images from our own presentation at Collective, which we’ll be posting tomorrow.
Jonathan Nesci hung three dozen mirrors on the wall for his Present Perimeter project, which explored “a compositional framework that combines equal numbers of hexagons, half-hexagons, rhombuses, and triangles.”
New vases by Thaddeus Wolfe at R & Company’s booth
New vases by Thaddeus Wolfe at R & Company’s booth
Jonah Takagi’s site-specific “Colosseum” installation for Artsy, which was a huge stair-stepped seating arc covered in multi-colored industrial foam.
Cody Hoyt covered a table in new ceramic vessels for Patrick Parrish.
Hoyt works in more mediums than just ceramics, though — he lined Parrish’s booth with his drawings and paintings.
One of our favorite items in the show was this new coffee table by Ghiora Aharoni in Donzella’s booth, made from heavy gauge steel and safety glass.
Also in Donzella’s booth, vases by Sottsass.
Sottsass vase in Donzella’s booth
An “Eye Lamp” from 1968 designed by Nicola L.
Nearby, in Galerie Negropontes’s booth, a new eye mirror by Hervé Langlais.
An unidentified sculpture from Galerie Negropontes.
Etages Projects had half its booth stuck in customs, but what remained — a series of sculptures by FOS — was still impressive.
Huge hand sculptures by Wolfs + Jung at Ammann Gallery’s booth.
A side table by Panoramica at Ammann Gallery.
New tables by Misha Kahn at Friedman Benda’s booth.
Kahn also made a series of lamps in Africa that debuted with Friedman Benda.
Misha Kahn at Friedman Benda
A 1960 tapestry by Le Corbusier presented by Bruun Rasmussen.
A lamp at Nicholas Kilner’s booth.
Memphis Post Design Gallery installed confetti carpeting and had pieces like this Shiro Kurimata table on view.
An amazing trio of granite and silver candlesticks from 1987 by Kristian Nilsson.
Collective invited Various Projects and Print All Over Me to do an installation on an upper mezzanine, and the result was the Nap Lab, a cushion-filled chill zone with work by Katie Stout and Dome Collective.
Kinder Modern debuted new kids furniture by Material Lust.
Previous pieces by AQQ Design for Kinder Modern.
A new chaise by Grégoire de Lafforest and a small bit of OS & OOS’s Mono-Light on view at Galerie Gosserez.
New tabletop sculptures by Kneip at Fuglen’s booth.
One of several pretty sculptures by Arne Lindaas at Fuglen.
A mask by Arne Lindaas at Fuglen.
After our phenomenally successful, inaugural Sight Unseen OFFSITE event last year — which included an Instagram-ready still-life photo booth, a Memphis-y soup of Print All Over Me goodness, and a cocktail party with a line around the block — the question on everyone's lips was: But will you do it again? Today, we're happy to announce that yes, Sight Unseen OFFSITE will be returning for a second, even more exciting year!
Glancing out the window on this cold, grey, rainy day in New York City, it's hard to believe that just last week we were frolicking in the sunshine in Miami, immersing ourselves in art and design and running into friends like Su Wu and Brent Dzekciorius on the street while flitting between parties and champagne brunches. While the primary purpose of our time there was to launch a new collaboration with Print All Over Me for the shop at the Standard (read all about that here), we managed to squeeze a million other activities into our four-day trip, from a visit to the impeccably curated Untitled art fair to a bizarre slide lecture and fashion show by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to a 3AM performance by rapper Rae Sremmurd at a local nightclub that left our ears ringing for three days straight. While you won't find that particular dalliance documented here, we did take plenty of photographs of art and design; some of our favorites are posted after the jump.
In March we broke the news about our second annual New York design week exhibition, Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which is free and open to the public and takes place this year at Hudson Mercantile, 500 W. 36th St. at 10th Ave., from May 15 to 18. But today we're giving you an official preview of the show, which this year encompasses nearly 100 brands, designers, and studios creating everything from furniture to a photo booth to an immersive living room installation to a vegan-friendly daily lunch cafe.
