04.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Gallery Show in London Takes Wood to Unexpected Places

Maybe it's because I've been watching Ellen's Next Great Designer (which, honestly, you should be as well, it's highly entertaining and it features THREE former Sight Unseen subjects!), but an exhibition where designers riff on the range and versatility of wood feels extremely low-stakes. (Also not a knock; it's an appropriately sized brief for coming out of a year of lockdown). But that's also what makes it all the more impressive that Gallery FUMI's first exhibition of 2021, called The Beautiful Grain and featuring 11 of the gallery's artists, should be so insanely inventive.

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04.27.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Canadian Design Show Was Dreamed Up Before the Pandemic. So Why Is It About Mutation, Isolation, and Fear of the Unknown?

Set in an abandoned, somewhat post-apocalyptic-looking building in the middle of Montréal, FICTIONS offers visitors a surveillance-like experience, with four different camera angles offering a glimpse of the half-shrouded pieces, alongside an eerie accompanying score. Though there was no brief, many of the pieces play with ideas about mutation and perception.

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04.19.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Stacey Rees’s Abstract Female Portraits Capture a Moment of Inner Contemplation

In her previous works, the Australian painter Stacey Rees seemed to be captivated by the strange and modern notion of the selfie. Her portraits explored the idea that people can define their self-worth by the public face they show to the world and that people can, in fact, manipulate those images for a better outcome. What comprised the inner life of those who swore by such digital machinations, she seemed to ask? In her new body of work, which was on view this month at the Sydney gallery Saint Cloche, Rees appears to sink even deeper into the stillness of contemplation.

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04.02.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Exhibition, Abstract Paintings and Anthropomorphic Vessels Pair Perfectly

In ballet terms, a pas de deux is a duet. Two dancers perform a sequence in such perfect, excruciating synchronicity that it appears they are, for the fleeting moments they inhabit the stage, two halves of the same whole. This kind of creative coupling is what curator Kitty Clark had in mind when she put together her latest show, Soul Bed, featuring painter Hannah Nowlan and ceramic artist Tatsiana Shevarenkova, which just opened its doors at Saint Cloche Gallery in Sydney, Australia.

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03.25.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Caesar Salad Chandelier is the Centerpiece of This New Exhibition

At her new gallery show, Thank You For The Nice Fire, Chloe Wise employs food to great, grotesque effect: The show's centerpiece is a Caesar Salad Chandelier studded with croutons, its urethane romaine lettuce leaves fanning out like rococo paillettes, its milky "dressing" dripping into a puddle on the gallery floor below. Atop glass block plinths, there are thick mounds of waxy butter, punctuated by ears of corn; in one painting, a bodiless hand appears to want to plunge its fingers into a pile of garlic.

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03.23.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

An Iconic Children’s Book is the Inspiration Behind This Incredibly Joyous Exhibition

A friend of mine and I have often joked about how Goodnight Moon, the classic 1947 children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, would make an excellent moodboard for a gloriously maximalist interior design project: The incredible color blocking! The striped drapes! The scalloped picture frames! The animal hide rug! And while we still would love to see those benchmarks turned into something truly livable, a new exhibition has done the next best thing.

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03.19.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

For Its Second Fully Virtual Outing, This Danish Design Exhibition Gets Personal

Mindcraft's interactive website includes individual designer pages, video interviews with the 10 Danish designers and studios, an AR component, and a 3D experience. Of course, as with any exhibition like this, the bells and whistles don't add up to much unless the quality of the work is there to support it, and in this case, thankfully, that is true. But while the AR component is interesting, it's the videos that provide both context and emotional heft.

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03.16.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

16 Talents to Watch From This Year’s Stockholm Design Week

Stockholm was one of the few design fairs that slid in under the wire, early in 2020 before the world shut down. So it makes even more sense that the fair's organizers decided to exercise prudence and call this year's edition off. Greenhouse, the section of the fair that's typically home to design schools and talents to watch, was presented digitally, while some of the schools — including Konstfack and Beckmans — banded together for a group show in town.

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03.04.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Meet UNNO, the New Online Gallery Championing Latin American Design

UNNO, a new online-only gallery from architect Laura Abe Vettoretti and interior designer Maria Dolores, is making the most of the situation after plans to open a physical gallery in Milan last year were put on hold. Their mission, they tell us, is to introduce the richly varied landscape of Latin American design to collectors across the globe, spurred on by the region’s fertile mix of craft tradition and yet-to-be-discovered crop of contemporary designers.

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02.17.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Garance Vallée Paintings and Totems Are Familiar But Surreal

For her inaugural American exhibition this month at Carvalho Park in Brooklyn, Garance Vallée was meant to create a holistic environment, working with fabricators in the neighborhood to create a kind of set design that would encompass her new paintings, which are on view for the first time. That plan, of course, was scrapped when COVID hit, and Vallée scaled down her ambitions to that which could be fabricated in her own live/work space in Paris, then shipped in a crate to New York. In some ways, however, being forced to reckon with her own surroundings is part of the point of the exhibition.

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02.12.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Ceramic Lamps, Paired With Delicate Paper and Bamboo Shades, Are About to Be Everywhere

We first stumbled across Bennet Schlesinger's lamps on the Instagram of a friend. Perched atop two handmade ceramic bases were shades made from translucent paper sheets, stretched across a cambered latticework of bamboo strips. They were glowing and fresh and new, and we immediately fell in love. Now, the Southern California–based Schlesinger, who designs under the name Lightsong Exchange, is co-headlining an exhibition of his work at the new Los Angeles gallery Stanley’s.

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12.03.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

If You’re Tired of the Brass Trend, This is the Exhibition For You

As design editors, it is our duty to report on design trends or at least acknowledge the ones that take over a certain year. But that does not mean we necessarily like all of those trends, nor do we always agree with the pace at which they bloom, wither, and die. Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi must have had some bone to pick with the utter ubiquity of brass over the past few years for she recently curated an exhibition for FAR at Nilufar Gallery in Milan, featuring 13 designers and studios experimenting with metals and materials other than brass.

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