05.08.14

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Preview the 2014 Show!

Back in March, we gave you a small taste of what was to come at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, our brand new nomadic design fair opening May 16 at 200 Lafayette Street in New York's Soho neighborhood. But a lot has happened since then! Most notably, we've brought some exciting partners on board and finalized our official lineup, which is now packed with more than 50 independent designers and forward-thinking brands, all of whom have been hand-picked by the editors at Sight Unseen. Open to the public May 16 to 20 — during the hours of 12PM to 7PM Friday and 11AM to 7PM Saturday through Tuesday — Sight Unseen OFFSITE is New York design week's most exciting platform for new ideas and talents. Check out a small preview after the jump of some of the works that will be on view during the show, then join us next weekend to see it in person!

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05.07.14

Studio Visit

Upstate, Fashion Designers

If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Sight Unseen, it’s that a lack of training can sometimes go an awfully long way. Such was the case with Kalen Kaminski and Astrid Chastka of Upstate, who started their popular Brooklyn-based, shibori-inspired womenswear and accessories label back in 2010 with nary a day of fashion training between them. When they first met a few years earlier, Kaminski was an anthropology major turned prop stylist and Chastka was an architecture grad turned unhappy architect. Soon after bonding over an appreciation of handcrafted items, they found themselves trawling New York fabric stores, trying to replicate one of Kaminski’s vintage scarves. “We couldn’t find anything we liked, and we probably had no idea where to go,” Chastka told me when we visited the pair’s Greenpoint studio a few months back. “At the time, Kalen was living with an artist, and he had a shibori tapestry on his wall. We saw that, and we were like, ‘That’s perfect.’”

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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 Their original website launched in 2006, but they'd recently grown so frustrated with its outdated design that they'd stopped updating it all together; this weekend, they quietly launched projectno8.com 2.0, a brand new site that's truer to their current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.

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05.03.14

Saturday Selects

Week of April 28, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a website that treats industrial supplies as art, an exhibition that treats styrofoam scraps as furniture, and a side table (pictured above) that comes in three flat-pack, numerically based configurations, each more beautiful than the next.

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05.02.14

At Home With

Monique Meloche, Chicago Gallerist

When Monique Meloche took a chance on opening a Chicago gallery back in 2000, she launched with a show called Homewrecker, for which she invited 30 artists to exhibit over all three floors of her Ukrainian Village townhouse. The huge turnout prompted her to find a more permanent spot, as did gentle prodding from her husband. “He was like, ‘Sorry, I don’t want people sitting on my bed watching videos on Saturday when I come home from the gym.’” But while her home is no longer on public view, it remains a kind of lived-in display of contemporary paintings, photography, and sculptural works by artists she represents along with those she simply loves. We were lucky enough to visit recently and get to know Meloche a bit better.

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04.09.13

At Home With

Luren Jenison, Textile and Display Designer

Luren Jenison tends to describe her professional life as a “wild goose chase” — a neverending manic hunt through thrift stores, flea markets, and even forests to find the vintage oddities, natural artifacts, and textiles she uses in her elaborate installations. She’s constructed woodland scenes with foraged moss and taxidermied foxes for internal meetings at Anthropologie, set up tableaux with vintage books and building blocks for weddings and corporate galas, and even traveled all the way to China once to find a master joss-paper artisan to help her build a shimmery paper R.V. for a Free People store (he later panicked and pulled out of the project). And yet no matter how spectacular the results, at the end of the day they’re almost all temporary, set up for a night or a week or a month and then disassembled into their constituent parts to be trashed or banished to storage. Only the hunt goes on. If there’s one place you’d expect to find any permanent evidence of Jenison’s talents as both a visual stylist and an eagle-eyed picker, though, it would be in her own home.

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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.

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04.30.14

Fair Report

Chen Chen and Kai Williams at Design Days Dubai

When Brooklyn design duo Chen Chen and Kai Williams — known for their eccentric experimentation with materials — headed to Brazil two years ago for a residency with the gallery Coletivo Amor de Madre, they learned an important lesson the hard way: Don’t show up in a far-flung country expecting to source all your fabrication supplies at the drop of a hat. Invited to join the same gallery last month for an interactive installation at Design Days Dubai, they brought from home many of the materials they needed to make their new Moonmilk vessels (above), which they constructed live in their show booth from pigmented quick-dry cement slowly dripped onto a substrate. They also left time before the show began to scout working-class areas where, says Chen, “instead of big box stores like Home Depot, you’ll see an entire neighborhood in which one shop only sells plastic and another shop is a carpenter inside this little storefront, where you can say ‘I need pieces of wood cut to this size,’ and he’ll cut it for you.” The rest of their eight-day trip was spent making — and exploring.

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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.

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04.28.14

Q+A

Ferruccio Laviani on his Good Vibrations Series

Partly as a consequence of being based in Italy, one of the biggest furniture-making centers in the world, Ferruccio Laviani does a lot of different work for a lot of different manufacturers, from sleek plastic lamps to futuristic lounge chairs. So when he was invited to collaborate with a manufacturer of baroque furniture founded in 1928 by a craftsman making Louis XV replicas — he accepted the challenge, creating a provocative series called “F* THE CLASSICS!” that puts a contemporary twist on the company’s traditional style. The latest piece in the collection, Good Vibrations — a computer controlled robotic router-carved wooden cabinet that looks like a warped VHS video — is so striking, it went viral on over a dozen design blogs shortly after renderings of it were released in advance of the 2013 Salone del Mobile in Milan (even though it was so difficult to produce that the real cabinet, pictured after the jump, wasn't even exhibited until the 2014 fair that took place a few weeks ago). For the Lincoln Now project that Sight Unseen recently participated in, Laviani took some time to tell us how (and why) he created it.

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04.26.14

Saturday Selects

Week of April 21, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a perfect marriage of plant and pot, a permanent home for a previously nomadic gallery, and a ceramic series inspired by the Fantastic Four.

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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.

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04.23.14

Up and Coming

Rimma Tchilingarian, product designer

So much of the current frenzy around ceramics revolves around what feats each practitioner can achieve with glaze, whether it's Adam Silverman's volcanic pots, Dana Bechert's carved vases, or Ben Fiess's brushstroked jars. But for the just-graduated Berlin-based product designer Rimma Tchilingarian, it's the properties of the clay itself that fascinated her the most. "I wanted to work with porcelain at a very basic level, free of conventions or rules, creating raw and unglazed surfaces or coloring the snow-white material with pigments," she says of her first collection At the Studio, for which colored or textured parts can be combined into a whole. She burned paper to achieve a crinkled effect and mixed in pigment to get that on-trend marbled look but has yet to experiment with the thing that so many of her brethren obsess over. We were so smitten with the results of her first collection we asked her to tell us a little bit more.

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