Justin Morin’s Silk Draperies Reference Pop Culture and Natural Phenomena in Equal Measure

Justin Morin’s printed silk installations take many forms — some unfurl dramatically against an expansive gallery wall; others are cinched and pleated like couture; still others are knotted, tied, looped, bunched, gathered, or, simply hang listlessly like a flag. Morin’s specific visual vocabulary, developed over the course of a decade since he created his first printed silk work in 2011, proposes that anything and everything in our information-dense and visually overwrought world can be unraveled and represented in sensual, gradient silk.
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Meet the Site Helping You Discover New Designers and Artists — Starting With These 14

When it launched, Wescover was an index of places and spaces — the Ace Hotels, De Maria restaurant in New York, Hauser & Wirth in LA — annotated with the names of artists and designers whose work they contained. Now its goal is to foster the discovery of independent talents within its pages, primarily through contextual interior photography that helps bring their work to life. To give you a jumping off point for exploring the site, we've rounded up 14 of our favorite creators, both familiar and new.
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Alteronce Gumby’s Shatteringly Optimistic Glass and Acrylic Paintings

With society’s focus on color, and especially the ways it has historically been used to label, oppress, or divide — Black and white, red and blue — Alteronce Gumby’s glass and acrylic paintings are multifaceted, glimmering beacons that propose a more nuanced perception of hue. Using foraged clear glass which the artist paints and shatters into jigsaw puzzle-sized pieces, Gumby’s latest body of work captures a hopefulness for the future — that what is broken can be put back together, for a result perhaps even more brilliant than before.
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James Evans’s Photorealistic Paintings Are a Meditation on Impermanence

The suffocated images of artist James Evans’ “Constraint Equation” series are a photorealistic depiction of what appears to be houseplants wrapped up in sheets of humid plastic that obscure and abstract them. Created during a period in quarantine, they are a fitting expression of the limitations and discomfort most of us have experienced this year. Evans, who grew up in Colorado and now splits his time between New York and Mexico City, is a prodigious new force in the art world.
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Inside Creative Growth, the Always Inspiring Oakland-Based Incubator For Artists With Disabilities

While the work of Creative Growth artists has hung in the MoMA and Brooklyn Museum, has been emblazoned on designer accessories by Marc Jacobs, has been commissioned by Facebook, and has been scooped up by everyone from celebrities to the most prestigious galleries and dealers, there are still many people who are happening upon it for the first time. Here, 10 artists on the current Creative Growth roster whose work we find especially compelling.
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Duro Olowu’s Mind-Expanding Chicago Exhibition Crosses Time, Place, Gender, and Race

Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, the highly anticipated exhibition curated by the Nigerian-born British designer, was up for only two weeks at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago before the pandemic shutdown of last March. But when the MCA re-opened, it thankfully extended the show's run into early fall. Walking through the rooms — teeming with over 300 works Olowu selected from the city’s public and private art collections — was a bit like scrolling through a really engaging, unpredictable Instagram account, but without the glazed exhaustion and listlessness that comes from being so online. Or the frustration of being on the outside looking in. This was a show that welcomed you.
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Week of September 28, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: LRNCE makes her first lamps, a New York designer releases a Memphis-style mirror to rival the Ultrafragola, and India Mahdavi opens a project space for experimental installations like the one pictured above.
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Juliette Wanty 3D rendered interiors

These Limited-Edition Art Prints Look Right At Home in Juliette Wanty’s Poppy, 3D-Rendered Interiors

Most designers can point to the specific starting point that inspired a space, whether it be a concept, like a Balearic disco; a singular element, like a gilded backsplash; or a particular shade of blue. For a recent 3-D rendered thought experiment, Absolut Art proposed that it could also just be a single piece of art. The Stockholm-based company, which works with up-and-coming talents to create and sell affordable, limited-edition fine art prints, asked interior stylist Juliette Wanty to design five rooms inspired by five of its collaborators.
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This L.A. Artist’s Studio Is the Epitome of Calming, Meditative Vibes

For Los Angeles–born artist Cindy Hsu Zell, nature has been a lifelong inspiration. Working from her sunny North Hollywood studio, Zell creates tactile sculptures with rope, ceramic, wood, and, most recently, stone. In the midst of this confounding global crisis, we remote-toured her space and took some time to chat with her about confronting the economics of productivity, prioritizing mindful practices, and the magic of working with organic materials.
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Katie Stout and the Subversion of American Craft

In her latest solo exhibition at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, called Sour Tasting Liquid, Katie Stout focuses her experiments exclusively in ceramics, exploring processes like slab-building, mosaic, pinching, kintsugi, and more to make a body of work that is at once figurative and abstract, logical and absurd.
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Mexico City designer Alberto Oderiz

The Archeology of Mexican Artist-Architect Alberto Odériz

It’s no secret that here at Sight Unseen, we have a bit of an obsession with stone and its many forms. Perhaps that’s why we’re so smitten by the work of Mexican architect and sculptor Alberto Odériz. Stone is his inspiration, his material, and his passion. From small sculptures, to full room installations, to huge plazas and other inhabitable spaces, Odériz’s work is dynamic and innovative.
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