06.17.14

Sighted

Milleneufcentquatrevingtquatre

Is there any better canvas than the square silk scarf? Not for Amelie Charroin and Marie Colin-Madan of the French accessories brand Milleneufcentquatrevingtquatre. (That's 1984 for the less Francophilic among you). The two women use the fashion staple to explore hand-drawn, screen-printed themes that take inspiration from video clips, art history, and instances of timeless pop culture.

06.02.14

Sighted

Amazon Primed by Noah Kalina

Most of the images that photographer Noah Kalina posts on his popular Tumblr feed are relatively random — portraits of friends, excerpts from his commercial shoots, behind-the-scenes tidbits. But every once in awhile, any of his million-plus followers who are paying attention will notice him initiating or adding to a recurring series, like the one in which he always documents, while traveling, the view from the window of his temporary room. These mini-projects represent his most personal work, the ideas he has and then pursues in his spare time, for no other reason than to challenge himself creatively and/or keep himself busy between shoots. Amazon Primed, his latest such endeavor, showed up on his Tumblr in late February in the form of an image depicting three external hard drives and an ethernet switch.

05.30.14

Sighted

Ian Stell Shot By Rob Howard

With a debut solo show at Matter in April and a major presentation last week at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, up-and-coming furniture designer Ian Stell has had the opportunity to introduce his kinetic, transformable furniture to quite a few people this spring. Yet most of them, apparently, have read it completely wrong. "I've gotten comments recently from people who ... assumed I have an engineering background or was trained as an architect, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth," he recently told photographer Rob Howard, on whose portfolio site we recently discovered dozens of shots of Stell at home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and at his nearby studio.

05.05.14

Sighted

Project No. 8’s New Website

For years, fans of the New York concept shop Project No. 8 have been begging its founders, Brian Janusiak and Elizabeth Beer, to expand beyond their LES flagship and Ace Hotel annex and open more stores. But the pair have consistently refused, because they knew all along exactly where their next location needed to be: online. Their original website launched in 2006, but they'd recently grown so frustrated with its outdated design that they'd stopped updating it all together; this weekend, they quietly launched projectno8.com 2.0, a brand new site that's truer to their current inventory and that effectively leapfrogs them over eight years of e-commerce evolution. Greeting visitors to the homepage is a slideshow of still-life images by New York photographer Clemens Kois, who met Janusiak when the pair collaborated on Carl Aubock: The Workshop — we asked each of them to tell us a little bit more about the project.

05.01.14

Sighted

The Past Is Never Dead, by Philipp Schenk-Mischke and Matthias Klas

The Past Is Never Dead is the thesis project of Philipp Schenk-Mischke and Matthias Klas — soon to be graduates of the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany — and as such it has the required amount of critical thinking to back it up: "Taking an object and shifting the focus from form and use to the thoughts it provokes was the starting point of this project," the designers write. The shape of their Cabinets (above), they add, "comes from the metaphor of breaking conventions: parallel ash frames stand for the stuck structures of today's world while skewed lines ... try to break free from common notions to discover the new." That's all well and good, but we think all you need to understand this work is two eyeballs. We're looking forward to using them to see what the pair does next.

04.29.14

Sighted

Arlene Shechet, Artist

Pulp paper pieces and much-lauded ceramic work have brought the artist Arlene Shechet to the forefront of the contemporary art scene. A late career artist, Shechet has been included in recent group exhibitions with hot young ceramicists of the moment as well as showing alongside veterans Betty Woodman and Kathy Butterly. Her paper work focuses on the idea of the bleed and impregnation in addition to the fluid nature of water, formlessness becoming form, change and fragility. Shechet's ceramics also include this liquid plasticity, coming to life through moment-to-moment alterations, always on the verge of failure and containing "a hybrid comic clumsiness" as she explains it, "while at the same time, they have airiness and elegance." Shechet lives and works in New York City and upstate New York.

04.24.14

Sighted

Shu Hung and Joseph Magliaro of Table of Contents on Freunde Von Freunden

Our favorite retail stores set themselves apart by virtue of their impeccable curation and unique points of view — naturally, the folks who run them tend to apply those same skills to their personal interiors, making them prime candidates for house-tour stories like the one we recently did on Totokaelo's Jill Wenger. Joseph Magliaro and Shu Hung from the Portland store Table of Contents might have been our next stop, but — next best thing! — our friends at Freunde von Freunden beat us to it. Earlier this week, they published dozens of gorgeous photographs of Hung and Magliaro hanging out at home and walking around Portland, plus a few shots of their store (below) and office. Check out a short excerpt from that piece after the jump.

04.21.14

Sighted

Luke Armitstead’s Ceramics

We discovered the ceramics work of Luke Armitstead — born in Seattle, currently in grad school in Wisconsin — at Johnson Trading Gallery here in New York, where we spotted one of his colorful, organic planters standing sentry just outside the space's entrance. Yet as it turns out, Armitstead isn't a designer but an artist who frequently references the built environment. "In my work, one may see colorful fragmented structures, primal bodily forms, architectural models, or funky planters," says Armitstead, whose inspirations span Antoni Gaudi and Friedensreich Hundertwasser to Sterling Ruby and Thomas Houseago. "However, aside from my organic forms, my projects are driven by structured ideas that seek to relate to, or interact with, a physical landscape or place."

04.08.14

Sighted

Ladies & Gentlemen Studio’s Form Studies

When we first interviewed Jean Lee and Dylan Davis of Seattle's Ladies & Gentlemen Studio back in 2012, they revealed that a sizable chunk of their design process happens on and around the shelves that line every room in their home studio and serve as a kind of 3-D inspiration board.

04.04.14

Sighted

Ashley Helvey’s #IRL Exhibition

Today on the site, we're giving you a peek inside Seattle creative Ashley Helvey's home and studio, but we also wanted to show you the results of the work that was being created there during our visit. Last week, at Seattle's Love City Love art space, Helvey debuted an exhibition with possibly the best name — and best concept — we've heard to date: "#IRL (internet shorthand for 'In Real Life ') is Helvey's exploration and reflection on being an artist in the age of Tumblr, Instagram and the reblog," the show text reads. "With the vast array of technological opportunities we have to broadcast our identity and redistribute images of art and design, at what point do we create our own content? #IRL presents work created by Helvey, that references images and works from the internet, many of which have been re-posted on her blog, HunterGathererer. These works, brought together under Helvey's distinct aesthetic and material sensibility, reject the lament that there is really nothing new. Instead, this exhibition celebrates the impact of technology and social media and its wealth of imagery as direct inspiration for creating real and tangible art objects.'"

04.03.14

Sighted

Sol Hashemi, Artist

Growing up in Vancouver, Sol Hashemi was wedded to his father's camera, dreaming since age six of someday becoming a nature photographer. Now 27 and living in Seattle, however, he may be the farthest thing from it — while he does wield a camera for a living, and occasionally points it at the odd plant or rock, his sculptures and still-life compositions go to great lengths to make them appear as un-natural as possible, marrying them with things like glitter, candy wrappers, and cans of baked beans. His work is all about weird — or not so weird, if you're a Tumblr devotee — juxtapositions.

04.01.14

Sighted

Amanda Ringstad, Photographer

Amanda Ringstad is a Seattle-based still-life and product photographer, and though there's remarkably little written about her on the internet, the information that's there makes perfect sense the instant you look at her work. She has a BFA in photography and studied sculpture and art theory in graduate school; in practice, this translates to the most arresting images you've ever seen of staples, garlic shoots, and those weird foam thingys you put between your toes during a pedicure.