03.13.13

Sighted

New Work by David Taylor

In case you hadn’t noticed, the big trend in these leaner, post–economic disaster days, has been to elevate the lowest of low-grade materials into something elegant by design. OSB, polystyrene, plywood, plastic, MDF, resin — the list is endless. But you’d be hard pressed to think of a designer who does the opposite, who purposefully debases the precious commodity he’s been trained to craft to perfection. And yet what other choice did David Taylor have? After graduating from Konstfack in 1999, the Stockholm-based silversmith began to see the price of his raw materials soar: “Silver simply became too expensive for me to work with,” he says. “Without the benefit of a commission, working on spec becomes impossible when silver has quadrupled in price over the last eight years.” But Taylor’s loss was our gain: The designer began dabbling a few years ago in what he calls “a cheaper neighborhood,” making object assemblages by grafting more inexpensive materials like concrete, brass, and steel onto smaller silver pieces.

03.11.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Figures & Routines by Eva Berendes at Jacky Strenz Gallery

Plenty of great artists and art historians have pondered the idea of painting leaving behind or transcending the canvas, but when I visited the Berlin studio of Eva Berendes last winter and heard her talk about her own work's gradual journey beyond frames and stretchers, the first person who came to mind was Bruno Munari. In his amazing little book Design As Art, the Italian icon describes the idea behind his hanging mobiles — aka "Useless Machines" — as an attempt to liberate painting from its fundamentally static nature and give it movement and dimension; Berendes describes her own pieces in much the same way. Despite focusing almost entirely on painting during her graduate studies, she decided to create a free-flowing curtain for her thesis project because she found it somehow liberating, and she's kept dipping her toes into the world of design and objects ever since, blurring the line between two dimensions and three. For her latest project, on view at Berlin's Jacky Strenz Gallery through April 8, she's ventured even further into that world, mounting a jumble of vintage objects, packing materials, and hand-painted silk swatches onto hand-welded black metal grids, thus "abolishing any distinction between the inimitable and the mass-produced."

03.04.13

Up and Coming

Fredrik Paulsen, furniture designer

Fredrik Paulsen’s work, both as a designer and as a co-founder of Stockholm’s brilliant Örnsbergsauktionen is shaking the foundations of what you think Scandinavian design ought to be. “Here you are taught to produce work for the everyman,” Paulsen says. “It’s the legacy of IKEA: Good design for everyone. But if your work doesn’t really fit into mass production and it is not intended for it, then there is no platform or venue to show it.” It was this void that led Paulsen and his friends and fellow designers Simon Klenell and Kristoffer Sundin to stage their first auction during last year’s Stockholm’s Design Week. They invited contemporaries — some they knew, others they only knew of — to submit diverse, self-made works that went beyond the cookie-cutter forms they’d grown tired of, and put them up for bidding. It paid off.

02.27.13

Excerpt: Book

Carl Auböck: The Workshop by Clemens Kois and Brian Janusiak

Is it possible to love something too much? What about when you're an avid collector of something that teeters on the line between fame and obscurity? For Austrian photographer Clemens Kois, a longtime devotion for the century-old Viennese design workshop Carl Auböck carried a particularly trying dilemma: He had the chance to make a book that could finally introduce the long-overlooked brand to the mainstream, vindicating his fervor and helping to build up the very collecting market he was engaged in, but that would in all likelihood make it harder for him to acquire the objects he loved so much. Luckily for the rest of us, he chose to follow his passion, joining forces with Brian Janusiak of Project No. 8 and powerHouse Books to create Carl Auböck: The Workshop, which came out this past fall.

02.20.13

Studio Visit

Bari Ziperstein, Ceramicist

To know a ceramicist is to see their test pieces, and Bari Ziperstein has the kind of overflowing studio that doesn’t happen in a minute, that comes from years of private experiments and the hard work of learning not to care so much. “I think of these pieces as sculptural doodles,” she says, referring to a series of small, accidental ceramic sculptures. “They’re such a discrepancy from how I usually work, something no more than two inches. It’s really free and immediate.”

02.19.13

Sighted

The Faye Toogood Collection at We See Beauty

When we first heard that Faye Toogood, one of our all-time favorite furniture designers and stylists, had been trysting with the make-up industry, creating a concept collection for the recently launched beauty brand MAKE — well, we weren’t one bit surprised. After all, Toogood has made a career of never quite doing what you’d expect her to do. What’s surprising, actually, is why more designers haven’t tried their hand at beauty. To dabble in a new discipline like fashion or ceramics would involve acquiring a rigorous new skill set. But to devise a collection for an existing makeup brand, as Toogood has, requires only a preternatural sense of materiality and color, both of which the designer has in spades.

02.18.13

Studio Visit

Landon Metz, Artist

To the extent that we cover art on Sight Unseen, it makes sense that we'd naturally gravitate towards action painting — artists may always have plenty to say about the relationship of their work to the viewer, or to philosophy, or to the context of art history, but most of the time we're interested in something a little more prosaic than that, like how they get their hands dirty, and why they've chosen one medium over another. With gestural works, it's all about the process, and the liminal moments just before and after materials cease to be ordinary and paintings transform into something more than the sum of their parts. The work of the Greenpoint-based artist Landon Metz is a perfect example: His paintings are about painting, and how colorful enamel shapes laid down on a tilted canvas will move and evolve as their surface interactions and drying times are influenced by factors like humidity, daylight, and temperature. Sight Unseen contributor Paul Barbera visited Metz's studio recently for Where They Create, and — oh lucky day! — he did our work for us, creating his own podcast interview with the artist which you can listen to after the jump.

02.15.13

Sighted

Shino Takeda in Inventory Magazine

We first spotted Shino Takeda's awkwardly lovable, one-of-a-kind ceramic spoons and desert-style dishes at Caitlin Mociun's store in Brooklyn, but the ceramicist's work is a testament to the fact that you can still find amazing things on Etsy if you know where to look: Takeda keeps a store there called "Shino's World," and browsing its vases and bowls, you really get the sense that she lives inside her own storybook, where tea sets are named after bluebirds and sake cups appear poised to kiss. But we didn't know much more about the real Shino until last week, when Inventory Magazine took a more literal look inside her world — with editor Ryan Willms photographing her at work in her Brooklyn studio — and so we couldn't resist the chance to feature the story here in an attempt to put all the pieces together.

02.13.13

Up and Coming

Asaf Weinbroom, Lighting Designer

If Asaf Weinbroom had ended up a fashion designer, the way he intended from a young age growing up in Tel Aviv, it’s easy to envision what the hallmarks of his design might have been: unconventional draping, vintage buttons or clasps, and an obsession with transforming materials that would normally be considered pedestrian. After all, as a lighting designer — the path he chose after being rejected from a fashion program — his pieces have all followed a similar formula. “I begin to design from the inside out,” he says. “I’ll start with small details, joints, or mechanisms, and when those are done I decide which type of light it will be.”

02.12.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Alley-Oop by Will Bryant and Eric Trine at Poketo

Before the show Alley-Oop opens at L.A.'s Poketo store this coming Saturday, you should take a moment to thoroughly examine the portfolios of its two Portland-based collaborators, illustrator Will Bryant and furniture designer Eric Trine. Because think about it: How easy is it to picture the results of a collaboration spanning the two disciplines? Especially when Bryant's work is so crazy vibrant — full of squiggles and anthropomorphized hot dogs wearing neon sunglasses — and Trine's is so very understated, albeit with a lot of cool geometries in the mix. Alley-Oop is like one of those software programs that lets you crudely merge the faces of two people to find out what their child might look like at age 5, though perhaps a better metaphor would be that it's like what would happen if you pumped two designers full of methamphetamine and locked them in a room together for 48 hours with nothing but some spray paint and a welding gun. Actually, that's not too far off from how Bryant and Trine describe it themselves. See our interview with the pair after the jump, along with the first preview images of their collaborative work — which hopefully won't be the last.

02.08.13

Up and Coming

Ya Wen Chou, Textile and Product Designer

Ahh, design school — where navel-gazing and the pretentions of identity art are not only tolerated, but encouraged (on days when the lesson plan doesn't focus on sustainability or people with disabilities, of course). It's easy for lesser talents to get sucked too far into these themes and end up with over-baked work that either borders on kitsch or is completely irrelevant to the wider world, but when done right, the results can be both beautiful and culturally illuminating — as in the case of Ya Wen Chou, who used her time in the RCA's textile department to dig into the traditions of her grandmother and her home country of Taiwan. "My grandmother’s house was always full of handicrafts made by Taiwanese artisans," she told the Arts Thread blog last year, explaining a main source of her inspiration. And her Precious Objects project — which first caught our eye on Pinterest — explores her culture's traditional reverence for nature's role in everyday life, which does feel rather universal, having a lot in common with everything from Icelandic elf mythology to Native American spirituality. Read more about Chou's point of view in our interview after the jump.

02.07.13

Excerpt: Book

Irving Harper: Works in Paper

To say Irving Harper once worked in the office of George Nelson is kind of like saying Hillary Clinton once worked in the office of Barack Obama — Harper’s contributions were almost too many to count. He worked under Nelson for 17 years and was responsible for some of the studio’s — and design history’s — most famous works, including the Marshmallow sofa and Herman Miller’s still-current logo. Rizzoli recently published a book on Harper, but it wasn’t to set the record straight about who did what (there’s long been controversy over Nelson receiving credit for things that were actually authored by Harper.) No, the book, Irving Harper: Works in Paper, reveals Harper’s even more secret life.