10.17.12

Sighted

Moss: Dialogues Between Art & Design Auction

Yesterday at Phillips de Pury in New York, the auction "Moss: Dialogues Between Art & Design" raked in more $5 million and smashed records for work by the likes of Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, and Patricia Urquiola. But while we're always pleased to see design taken a bit more seriously, it wasn't this auction's star power but rather its conceptual conceit that intrigued us so. Curated by Murray Moss — with many of the selections coming from Moss's own personal collection — the auction paired art and design pieces that seemed to share a common DNA, whether by virtue of material, technique, or appearance. The pairings were surprising and lovely, with the curves of Mattia Bonneti's plump purple velvet sofa echoing Luciano Castelli's reclining red nude, or the colored striations of Julien Carretero's To Be Continued bench causing the same sense of vertigo as Doug Argue's obsessive lines in (Untitled): Strata, 2011. (You can view the full catalog for yourself online here.) Perhaps best of all, the catalog was prefaced by an unusually personal story from Moss himself, who can seem a bit of a cipher to those not in his inner circle. We found the whole thing so interesting we've reprinted it in full here. Read on below, then follow our slideshow to see some of the highlights from last night.

10.11.12

Sighted

Kiosk’s Obama 2012 Souvenirs

In 1960, there was a noisemaker that said “Click with Dick,” endorsing Richard Nixon for President. In 1964, a canned novelty beverage promoted Barry Goldwater's candidacy (“Gold Water: The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste”). But these days, with Shepard Fairey’s once-inescapable "Hope" poster on the wane, you’d be hard-pressed to find an election souvenir of note beyond the usual bumper stickers, commemorative mugs, and buttons. Enter Kiosk, New York’s go-to retailer for quirky housewares and objects from around the world. This week, Kiosk owners Alisa Grifo and Marco ter haar Romeny released a collection of five pro-Obama souvenirs, which sport cheekily retrograde slogans and riff on American-made objects the shop already had in stock.

10.03.12

Studio Visit

Axel Peemöller, the Mediterranean Sea

On gloomy New York days like today, we begin to think that Axel Peemöller might be on to something. The German-born graphic designer studied in Düsseldorf, moved to California, and eventually settled in Melbourne, but a few years ago he gave it all up for a studio at sea. Aboard a 40-foot-long 1974 Trintella — which he purchased off eBay from a Barcelona woman for a song — Peemöller lives with his girlfriend and works remotely for clients and studios, docking when he needs to visit a colleague or use power to light a photo, and flying clients in to whichever port he’s landed. And while it’s not to say that life at sea is never gloomy, Peemöller finds that a fluid perch makes for a clearer head: “To do creative work, you need to have a balance between life and work and fun,” he says. “Here I can go diving, watch dolphins, catch octopus: I guess the not-working days are like holidays for other people, but for me it’s my usual life.”

09.27.12

Sighted

Isabel Wilson on Freunde Von Freunden

There must have been something in the air back in 2009, because Freunde Von Freunden, the Berlin-based website whose voyeuristic, photography-based interviews are of a piece with our own obsessions (i.e. barging in on people's home and workplaces and showing ourselves around) — started just a few weeks before Sight Unseen's launch at the end of that year. "We never look for apartments but for people," they say, and that's always been our mission as well — to get at the personality behind the product, and the narrative behind each new release. To that end, since we introduced you last week to Isabel Wilson's textile and jewelry line with Chen Chen — and considering we've more than covered her partner in crime — we figured it was high time to get to know the RISD grad's incredible,intricate work. Luckily FvF beat us to it, with a gorgeously photographed editorial by photographer Brian Ferry, which appeared on the site just last month, and which we're excerpting on Sight Unseen today.

09.12.12

Studio Visit

New Friends, Weavers

Back in 2009, Kelly Rakowski was a graphic designer at Todd Oldham in New York, and Alex Segreti was living in Philadelphia, working in the textiles department at Urban Outfitters. In her free time, Rakowski ran a blog called Nothing is New, for which she scoured image archives on the web, unearthing old exhibition catalogs, classic spreads from magazines like Domus, and vintage ceramics and textiles. Segreti had a blog as well, called Weird Friends, where she documented similar obsessions: craft, pattern, art, ceramics, textiles, and dogs. The two had never met, but when Rakowski emailed Segreti on a whim one day to tell her how much she liked her site, they began to bond; when both expressed a desire to learn how to weave by hand, they decided to embark on an experiment. They shipped each other yarn, so they’d have the same palette to work from, and a few months later Rakowski made the trip to Philly. They had dinner, retired to Segreti’s apartment, and showed each other their weavings. “They kind of looked the same,” Rakowski remembers. “It was crazy. Now we always come up with the idea together but work separately, and when we meet, we forget who did what because everything magically works.” The two eventually made their design partnership official, merging the names of their online identities into a fitting moniker: New Friends.

09.10.12

Up and Coming

PUTPUT, artists and photographers

In some ways, the work of the Danish-Swiss duo Putput could be considered a response to sites like this one: If we're constantly bombarded by scrolls of images, the two designers seem to ask, how can we be convinced to reconsider objects that at first glance seem so quaintly familiar? Projects like their Popsicle series (above), which found the icy treats replaced by scrubbing sponges, or Inflorescence — for which the two employed the visual language of still life to depict cleaning implements as potted plants — play with subverting our expectations in a way that could seem cliché if the resulting images weren't so exceedingly lovely. The two work at an increasingly trafficked intersection where photography, styling, art and design meet, which allows creators to control both the product and the way it's presented — both the input and the output, as it were, which is where their clever studio name comes from. We recently caught up with the two recent grads as they were dipping a toe into the contemporary art world and looking for new studio space.

08.31.12

Q+A

Future Eyes on I’m Revolting

When we first began following the inspiration blog mysteriously known as I'm Revolting, we knew we'd found a kindred spirit, at least aesthetically. (If you're even the slightest fan of our Pinterest, you should know that many of our posts originate with I'm Revolting's boards, or result from tumbling down the internet rabbit hole after reading one of her posts.) But it was only when we asked the Los Angeles–based blogger — whose real name is Su Wu — to pen one of our Q&A columns that we truly knew we'd stumbled upon one of our own: A former journalist who threw the contents of her interior world online after the publication for which she was writing folded, Wu is an image collector, a thinker, and a fantastic writer to boot. Today for Sight Unseen she interviews Brent Pearson, the artist behind a heavy, handmade pair of kaleidoscopic glasses known as Future Eyes.

08.21.12

Sighted

A 20th Century Palate in The Gourmand Issue 00

In the summer before starting Sight Unseen, one of us had a very brief flirtation with the idea of attending culinary school. Along with design, food is our great love, so we were pleased this week — and maybe even a little bit jealous — to stumble upon a new magazine out of London that unites the two disciplines in the most fantastic of ways. Called The Gourmand, the first issue tackles subjects ranging from David Shrigley's new cookery-themed opera to Jeff Koons's recipe for apple dumplings. But our favorite feature — plucked from the site's website, which has a sprinkling of teasers for the print edition as well as practical food recommendations from artists, contributors and London's culinary cognescenti — has to be this collaboration between art director Jamie Brown and photographer Luke Kirwan, which depicts 20th century art and design movements in foodstuffs like American cheese and pink wafer cookies.

08.17.12

Up and Coming

Hilda Hellström, Swedish Sculptor and Designer

In any designer’s career, there are hundreds of split-second decisions that conspire to create the precise conditions under which good work can emerge. For the Swedish-born, London-based designer Hilda Hellström, it came down to this one: When she was asked to create a project for this year’s Royal College of Art exhibition at the Milan Furniture Fair, she says with a laugh, “the wood workshop was quite busy, but the resin workshop was nice and quiet.” Of course, there’s more to the recent grad's breakout Sedimentation vases than that; Hellström is obsessed with the idea of imbuing her objects with a myth and narrative of their own. But in many ways the vessels — which are made from layers of pigmented Jesmonite, a non-toxic acrylic-based plaster often used in ceilings and restoration work — are a reaction against something else. “My father was a carpenter, so I was used to working with wood, and I was bored of how you have to consider that it’s a living material,” she says. “Wood tells you what to make, but working with a moldable material like Jesmonite is almost like playing God.”

07.26.12

The Making of

Lex Pott’s True Colours Series

In some ways, it seems fate that Dutch designer Lex Pott would end up working in a studio housed in an old shipyard in the northern precincts of Amsterdam. As a child growing up in Hilversum, 30 miles outside the city, Pott was obsessed with boats, constantly crafting miniature ones from the natural debris he’d find in the forest around his house, and using old plastic bags as sails. And in the short time since he set up his studio, after graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2009, he’s built up a small body of work centered around the very phenomenon that’s known to wreak havoc on seafaring vessels: oxidation. Pott has shot to fame in recent months on the basis of Transience, a series of silvered geometric mirrors designed in collaboration with fellow Eindhoven grad David Derksen. But the project that started it all, True Colours, was less a product than an investigation into the nature of color: Pott took standard sheets of industrial metals — copper, brass, steel, and aluminum — and played with oxidizing them by various methods, in the process creating a highly individualized palette he could, in theory, apply to any metal object.

07.16.12

Excerpt: Magazine

Clemence Seilles in PIN-UP #12

Berlin's many charms are hardly lost on your editors. After a sunny, weeklong trip five summers ago, we both fell in love with the German capital — the wide open spaces, the well-situated swimming pools, the way clubbing unfolds as an actually enjoyable activity. But while my partner in crime has returned to the German capital each consecutive summer, I've never been able to find the time to go back. This summer, then, I was lucky enough to visit by proxy through the eyes of Felix Burrichter and his staff of Berlinophiles over at PIN-UP Magazine, which devoted its entire Spring/Summer issue to the changing metropolis. "For very long, Berlin was this one thing: You went when you had no money," says Burrichter, who serves as both editor and creative director of the architecture biannual. "But there’s a cultural elite — a moneyed elite — that has developed there over the past 10 years. Mostly people from out of town or in the art world. So there's an interesting friction right now. When that moneyed elite takes over, the city will lose a lot of its charm. But right now it still feels very raw and budding." The issue was in some ways a homecoming — Burrichter grew up in Düsseldorf — but in the end, the Berlin depicted in the magazine's pages bears more of a resemblance to Burrichter's adopted home in New York. "What fascinates me about Berlin right now is that it's very international," he says; hence the features run to a British architect who recently remade the city's Neues Museum (David Chipperfield), a West African transplant (Francis Kéré), and Clémence Seilles, a Frenchwoman who arrived in Berlin with a singular goal — to assist in the studio of designer Jerszy Seymour — and who never left. We've been fans of Seilles' work for some time now, and her conversation in the magazine with fellow Sight Unseen friend Matylda Krzykowski was too good to confine to print. Burrichter has graciously allowed us to excerpt it today on Sight Unseen.

07.10.12

Sighted

Jerpoint Irish Glass for Makers & Brothers

Anyone who was in New York for our annual Noho Design District event this spring should be familiar with the Irish online homegoods brand Makers & Brothers; they would have been the ones making a beautiful mess on the floor of the Standard East Village hotel, as their woodworker James Wicklow carved stools made from Catskills-grade green ash by hand over the course of four days. But most of what namesake brothers Jonathan and Mark Legge do to showcase their particular brand of native handcrafted goods takes place a bit closer to home — which in their case is a shed located on the same property as their parents' home and architectural practice in Dublin. Since founding their online retail venture less than a year ago, the two have made a point of visiting and documenting the workspaces of the people who create products for them — the basketweaver who grows her own willow on the banks of the River Boyne, the Irish RCA grad who knits stool covers from a warehouse in East London, and, most recently, a family of glassblowers in Kilkenny whose Jerpoint brand drinking vessels the brothers grew up with. When we wrote Jonathan to ask if we could reprint some of their text and photos on Sight Unseen, he confessed he hopes to collaborate soon with Jerpoint — so perhaps a follow-up story will be in the offing for fall. Until then, if you're in Dublin, you can pop by the brothers' shed this weekend for a summer opening. If not, live the Makers & Brothers life vicariously through our excerpt after the jump.