02.10.14

Sighted

Tauba Auerbach’s Inspirations, on The T Magazine Blog

One of these days, our repeated attempts to worm our way into the New York studio of the very private, very busy, very genius artist Tauba Auerbach will succeed. But in the meantime, we were pleased to see a particularly Sight Unseen-y feature on her posted last week on T Magazine's blog, penned by our friend Ken Miller for his ongoing "Under the Influence" column. It's basically an 8 Things teasing out the people, places, and objects that are currently inspiring her work, of which Miller writes on the site: "Reminiscent of the 1960s Op Art movement, especially the British painter Bridget Riley, Auerbach’s hypnotic paintings, sculptures, books and prints reflect abstraction, Minimalism and even Pop, with a meticulous attention to craft. She creates bright, vivid color-fields through complex patterning, making sophisticated pieces that feel enticingly simple." Check out four of Auerbach's current obsessions after the jump.

02.07.14

Sighted

Slag Glas Bookends From Bazazas

Thanks to the power of e-commerce, quite a few creatives have felt inspired lately to open small, tightly curated shops featuring weird and wonderful small-batch objects by young makers (see also: Handjob Gallery Store). The newest is Bazazas, founded by the designers Scarlett Boulting of opus and Mary Voorhees Meehan. They've assembled a quirky yet sophisticated selection of objects by folks like Études Studio, ceramicist Giselle Hicks, and jewelry designer Sandra Russell, but our favorite offering is no doubt this in-house series of Slag Glas Bookends.

02.05.14

Sighted

Assembly’s 2x Aluminum Mirror

As journalists, it’s basically our job to be professional busybodies, so there’s almost nothing that gives us a bigger thrill than when designers offer us a sneak peek at what they’re working on next. This week, those designers were the unfailingly prolific Pete Oyler and Nora Mattingly of Brooklyn-based Assembly, whose work we’ve featured extensively on the site. Their brand new piece is the 2x Aluminum Mirror, which is crafted from a solid sheet of 1/4-inch aluminum that’s been finished with two different techniques in order to create both reflective and opaque effects on the same surface. Says Oyler, “It’s part of a broader collection of work, to be released at ICFF in NYC this May, that bridges highly skilled hand and machine processes to explore extremes, subtleties, and possible outcomes within common materials.” Of course we decided to snoop around a little more and asked Oyler to tell us a bit more about it.

01.29.14

Sighted

Celine SS14 Shoes & Accessories

Okay, so maybe we're not the first place you go for news about the ready-to-wear collections, but when we saw the new Spring/Summer line from Céline, with its brash painterly strokes and squiggles, we were knocked out. Then we saw the shoes — and had to share. There's something almost '90s-architect about them — like if we'd heard the one with the tubular gold heel was designed by Zaha Hadid, we might not have batted an eye — but they somehow go beyond that into something incredibly cool. We've included the season's amazing cuffs for your perusal as well, in crumpled painted copper or Mondrian-inspired enameled brass, but for a look at the full collection, get on over to the Céline website. You won't be sorry.

01.23.14

Sighted

Sevak Zargarian, Ceramicist

Sevak Zargarian is a London-based graduate of the Central Saint Martins undergrad course in Ceramics, for which his final project was the series of Grogged Vases pictured in the first half of this post. To make them, Zargarian first creates his own "grog" — broken-up scraps of stained and fired clay normally mixed into pottery to invisibly prevent kiln shrinkage — then makes a plaster bowl mold, which he dips into a bucket of grog-filled slip in a reverse-casting process. His Grogged Jars, below, use smaller grog bits and conventional plaster molds. Zargarian focuses on process- and materials-driven experimentation based around the tactile qualities of clay, yet rather than only celebrating the hand-made element of his work, he's more interested in how he might someday apply his studio discoveries to industrial production.

01.20.14

Sighted

Joanna Williams of Kneeland Mercado on Sous Style

There are a lot of reasons we've been reading Sous Style since former Elle photo director Pippa Lord first launched it in 2011: the casual, contemporary feel of the food photography, the glimpses into the homes and private lives of some amazingly cool women, and of course, all those incredibly gorgeous men(!). But we also love when Lord surprises us with different types of approaches to mixing food with fashion, design, and culture, including a post she did recently on textile-sourcing maven Joanna Williams of Kneeland Co. Mercado — in it, Williams reveals both the stories behind some of the items she's brought back from various cities to sell in her Los Angeles shop, as well as all of her favorite things to eat while visiting those places. Check out an excerpt from the story after the jump!

01.14.14

Sighted

Hanna Eshel on 1st Dibs

If you’re not in New York, you might never have heard of Hanna Eshel, the Israeli-born, 87-year-old artist who suddenly appeared in the cultural Zeitgeist this winter. We certainly hadn’t until we overheard our friend Patrick Parrish talking about her at a holiday party last month. Parrish’s Tribeca gallery is one of two spaces in Manhattan (the other being Todd Merrill) that’s simultaneously giving the talented painter–turned–sculptor a solo show, her first ever in New York. Of course, now that she’s on our radar, she’s suddenly everywhere — name-checked in hipster interiors posts and featured on 1st Dibs, in an interview we're excerpting today.

01.13.14

Sighted

Ryan Lauderdale, Artist

Ryan Lauderdale is a Brooklyn-based artist who was born in Cushing, Oklahoma, and graduated from Hunter College in 2012 with an MFA in Combined Media. It's fitting that we discovered him on Pinterest, as his thesis project dealt with the way parts of culture and history get presented, remixed, and diluted online.

01.08.14

Sighted

Eric Ashcraft, Artist

A Montana-born artist with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Eric Ashcraft is an expert in mining dualities for his mixed media pieces. In his earlier work, painted still-lifes were framed by neon bulbs, junked-out TVs became a canvas for Thomas Kinkade-like paintings, and a couch cushion turned into a lightbox. In his more recent work, though, Ashcraft seems to be blurring the lines among media even more with a series of abstract shapes in wood painted with oil and acrylic. "I began the Polytopes series by experimenting with geometrical forms, attempting to create a flexible object-space where the languages of painting and sculpture could intermingle," says the artist. "The restricted correspondence of light, surface, form, color, line, perspective, and composition are used to abstract objects and images into one another, hopefully generating meaning for a viewer through associations with fundamental aspects of perception. Essentially, the polytopes are about what they are as objects and how they are experienced." See more after the jump, and then click here for the up-and-coming artist's whole portfolio.

01.06.14

Sighted

Studio AH–HA’s Stationery Collection

We don't do this very often at Sight Unseen — post about the same subject twice in the span of two weeks — but in this case, we couldn't help it: When the young Portuguese graphics duo Studio AH–HA submitted their answers for our recent Up and Coming profile, they included eight impeccably styled photos of their personal stationery collection, and we couldn't bear to let the images go to waste. There are few things more beautiful than old paper goods, as anyone who's ever perused the goods at Present and Correct, or the mountains of vintage office ephemera available on Etsy, can surely attest. So we asked AH–HA's Catarina Carreiras and Carolina Cantante to share the stories behind the objects in the photos they shot for us, many of which they inhereted from Carreiras's late grandfather.

01.03.14

Sighted

Josephine Meckseper in Interview Magazine

Living in New York City, you'd think it would be easy to see world-class art nearly every weekend. But life tends to get in the way, whether it's needing a haircut or having to wait in a six-hour line just to see a 45-second exhibition. But one show we're going to do our darndest to see before it closes January 18 is the first New York solo exhibition by German-born, New York–based artist Josephine Meckseper at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. While we don't often love art that appropriates advertising imagery, Meckseper's deft combinations of that imagery with things like hand made sculpture casts and paintings speaks to us somehow. This particular show deals with Meckseper's own complicated history, having moved in the late '80s as a young adult from a sheltered, artistic European community to Valencia, California, where mall was king. We spotted this recent Q&A with the artist in Interview Magazine (which has kind of been killing it on the art front, lately, what with the epic Roberta Smith/Jerry Saltz conversation) and wanted to share a tiny excerpt below. Read on and then click through at the end for the interview in its entirety.

12.19.13

Sighted

Sunglasses by Joséphine Choquet & Virgile Thévoz

We're planning a bigger story on up-and-coming designer Joséphine Choquet in the new year, but before then, we wanted to share with you some work the French-born designer recently sent us: these gorgeously styled shots of the Luns sunglasses she created earlier this year in collaboration with fellow ECAL master's grad Virgile Thévoz. "The sunglasses use classic as well as more witty acetate patterns, as a tribute to this material, which carries on the essence of vintage and kitsch yet remains utterly contemporary," the designers write. There are 10 different models at the moment, in search of a producer, with a second collection already in the works for 2014.