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03.29.21

Sighted

Sarah Ellison’s Stand Out New Collection Features the Stripe

A bold Memphis sensibility meets sunny Byron Bay ease in Australian designer Sarah Ellison’s new capsule collection “La Banda,” meaning “the stripe” in Italian. Bands of ash and walnut wood lay next to each other to create a striped pattern, and rounded and rectilinear silhouettes playfully and unexpectedly alternate. In fashion, the notion of “the stripe” has a rich and varied history — a history that Ellison, a former fashion designer and stylist, was no doubt aware of.
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02.22.21

Excerpt: Book

Ken Miller’s New Book Pictures Photography Anew

A new volume by editor and curator Ken Miller celebrates photography not for the referential images it can capture, but for the possibilities of the medium in and of itself. Titled PICTURES, the book celebrates non-representational photography, and it’s a formal announcement of sorts that photographs, as an art form, have come into a category all their own and not just in service of documentation, representation, or narrative.
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01.26.21

Current Obsession

Justin Morin’s Silk Draperies Reference Pop Culture and Natural Phenomena in Equal Measure

Justin Morin’s printed silk installations take many forms — some unfurl dramatically against an expansive gallery wall; others are cinched and pleated like couture; still others are knotted, tied, looped, bunched, gathered, or, simply hang listlessly like a flag. Morin’s specific visual vocabulary, developed over the course of a decade since he created his first printed silk work in 2011, proposes that anything and everything in our information-dense and visually overwrought world can be unraveled and represented in sensual, gradient silk.
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11.09.20

Sighted

Simone Brewster’s Paintings Articulate the Complexity of the Female Form and Psyche

Like a creative ouroboros, Simone Brewster's practice is fluid, with each medium informing, influencing, and inspiring the other. And while the pandemic has certainly caused its share of widespread closures, cancellations, and general upheaval, in some instances it has also created surprising opportunities for creativity and experimentation. Unable to get to her studio due to lockdown protocols early on in the pandemic, Brewster decided to tackle painting, a medium she’d always been interested in but never had the time to explore — until now.
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11.06.20

Q+A

Alteronce Gumby’s Shatteringly Optimistic Glass and Acrylic Paintings

With society’s focus on color, and especially the ways it has historically been used to label, oppress, or divide — Black and white, red and blue — Alteronce Gumby’s glass and acrylic paintings are multifaceted, glimmering beacons that propose a more nuanced perception of hue. Using foraged clear glass which the artist paints and shatters into jigsaw puzzle-sized pieces, Gumby’s latest body of work captures a hopefulness for the future — that what is broken can be put back together, for a result perhaps even more brilliant than before.
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10.02.20

Up and Coming

6 Up-and-Coming Chinese Designers to Watch

A trinity of qualities anoints China as one to watch in the independent design landscape: a raft of regional, incubating talent; prodigious market demand; and design and production innovation. We recently spoke with six talents from the rising creative class to get an accurate read on a burgeoning design scene in China — which is increasingly showing itself to be not only uniquely Chinese but also distinctly of-the-moment.
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09.24.20

Up and Coming

This New Ceramics Brand is a Collab Between Two Parisians and the Berber Craftspeople of Northern Algeria

The unconventional ceramics brand IBKKI is the brainchild of Parisians Azel Ait-Mokhtar and Youri Asantcheeff. Their collections are a physical manifestation of their travels to the Kabylie region of Algeria and their collaboration with Berber craftspeople, but the duo didn’t take their cues from European Modernists like Matisse and Picasso, who had a tendency to appropriate elements from African art and call them their own.
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05.15.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Match Made in Murano — Mattia Bonetti Fuses with Famed Glassmakers for His Latest Collection

As often as Swiss-born, Paris-based Mattia Bonetti’s singular, one-of-a-kind furniture and design pieces are described as whimsical, it would make sense that they are created, well, on a whim. The designer doesn’t release work in cohesive collections, preferring to design fantastical one-off pieces whenever inspiration strikes. Bonetti’s newest pieces, handmade in collaboration with the famed glass artisans of Murano, Italy and presented by London gallery David Gill in an online exhibition, is surprisingly subdued but no less virtuosic.
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Mexico City designer Alberto Oderiz
11.21.19

Q+A

The Archeology of Mexican Artist-Architect Alberto Odériz

It’s no secret that here at Sight Unseen, we have a bit of an obsession with stone and its many forms. Perhaps that’s why we’re so smitten by the work of Mexican architect and sculptor Alberto Odériz. Stone is his inspiration, his material, and his passion. From small sculptures, to full room installations, to huge plazas and other inhabitable spaces, Odériz’s work is dynamic and innovative.
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06.06.19

Q+A

An Artist Responds to the Work of Victor Vasarely, Father of the Op-Art Movement

An internationally exhibited conceptual artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Oran Hoffmann was invited to the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence in 2017, where he sifted through boxes of Vasarely’s tiles, parallelograms, serigraphs, and other ephemera used to inspire and lay the groundwork for the unusual architecture of the foundation and the optically boggling sculptures and spaces within. Hoffmann’s new book is the culmination of a year of research and working with Vasarely’s archives.
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04.02.19

Up and Coming

Patricia Treib’s Paintings Are Abstract, But Rooted in the World of Objects

In Brooklyn-based painter Patricia Treib’s expansive abstract canvases, frothy pastels and opulent jewel tones abut daring and clever interventions of palette — a sudden wash of matte elephant gray against a translucent seafoam green, or a block of deep mahogany propping up a pale blue stain. Her paintings are a pleasure to take in, with a healthy dose of art history and a deep interest in the world of material objects as well as the physical properties of paint.
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