02.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Doty/Glasco at CES Gallery

We had never heard of the photography husband-and-wife team of JR Doty and Joe Glasco — or the LA gallery CES — before this exhibition announcement arrived in our inbox today, but as soon as we saw the photos we were hooked. The two photographers began collaborating professionally back in 2013, and their current work draws from an archive of more than 40,000 images that were taken on a road trip across America over the last year. Doty and Glasco photographed specific locations, like Utah and California, because of their unique geological conditions. "The images represent the essence of nature with an emphasis on the phenomena of time as it affects the landscape’s topography, such as rippling water, striations of marble and the constant changing of landforms," the press release reads.

01.29.15

Sighted

Elizabeth Atterbury, Artist

While the Maine-based artist Elizabeth Atterbury has done amazing things with just simple shapes cut into paper and steel, lately she's been getting a wee bit more ambitious — building a 3-by-4-foot sandbox in her studio and photographing compositions she's raked into it, or using a bandsaw to carve grill bricks into arcs and zigzags then documenting the crumbly results. Aside from photography — which she studied in school — she also exhibits sculptures in clay and painted wood. You can see them in person now through May 10 at Colby College Art Museum in Waterville, Maine, or pick up a copy of Atterbury's 2013 book with Bodega gallery, "In the Middle, an Oasis."

01.22.15

Sighted

Recreation Center’s Ceramics

There's a kind of genius in the way that Josephine Heilpern runs her ceramics studio, Recreation Center. Maybe not in the fact that she does everything — from designing to fabricating to filling orders — 100% on her own, with no help, running herself perpetually (yet gleefully) ragged, but more in how she knows exactly when to keep things simple versus when to let her imagination run wild. In the three years since she's been making the mugs, lamps, and mobiles we've been fortunate enough to stock in our online shop, she's barely changed her design formula, hewing to basic shapes and consistent patterns that resist becoming tiresome with daily use, yet on her site and her popular Instagram feed, she markets those objects with all the visual pizzazz of a 28-year-old raised on internet culture. When we invited her to shoot some of her creations exclusively for Sight Unseen, she turned up the styling charm, busting out the dollar-store props and studio scraps to bring her aesthetic vision to life.

01.21.15

Up and Coming

Daniel Everett, Photographer

Utah-based artist Daniel Everett has a BFA in photography from Brigham Young and a master’s from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But it may have been what happened between his two degrees that had the biggest impact on Everett’s career. “I’d done an internship as part of my undergraduate degree with Edward Burtynsky, and after I finished my undergrad, I traveled with him for just over a year,” Everett remembers. “If you know his work, Burtynsky photographs, like, manmade manipulations of the landscape: the largest open-pit copper mine, or the largest oil field. We were always traveling to some superlative location — the biggest, the widest, the greatest — and I got really interested in the in-between places that we passed through: the nondescript, transitory spaces like subway systems, airports, parking garages, and hotels. Spaces that are meant to be legible regardless of the language, and where the aesthetics are governed by function.”

01.17.15

Saturday Selects

Week of January 12, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about material experiments: ping-pong paddles in Plexi or wood, a yoga-ball holder built from inflated concrete and pigment, and furniture made from the remnants of an imaginary construction site.

12.17.14

Up and Coming

This is What Happens When Art Directors Get Married

It can be easy to become immune to the Postmodern references and patterns currently littering the digital ether, but there’s something different about Sarah Kissell, the Los Angeles–based designer behind the graphically-fitting guise Pure Magenta. As she describes it, it’s the simultaneous practice of excess and restraint — especially while exploring questionable taste — that Kissell values the most. “Riding the line between the two is when things become interesting to me,” she says. “It also widens the opportunity to succeed or fail, which is a healthy place to be a young designer.” And healthy is exactly where the designer is right now, dividing her time as senior art director for the terminally trendy fashion retailer Nasty Gal, as well as developing Pure Magenta’s graphic identity and soon-to-launch jewelry line.

12.15.14

Excerpt: Book

Down the Long Driveway, You’ll See It

There's nothing we love better than when our very talented, creative friends introduce us to their very talented, creative friends, and this week didn't disappoint: In our inboxes arrived the most beautiful submission from Mary Gaudin, a New Zealand photographer living in Montpellier, France, who was introduced to us through Brian Ferry, one of Sight Unseen's contributors and a wonderful photographer in his own right. Gaudin recently published a book on modernist New Zealand homes in collaboration Matthew Arnold of Sons & Co called Down the Long Driveway, You'll See It; the title is a quote from one of the book's subjects, upon giving directions to his home. The book documents 14 homes built between 1950 and 1974, and it's a revelation not only for the beautiful way in which it's photographed but for the peek it gives into New Zealand's architectural history.

12.12.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Adi Goodrich at The Standard, Hollywood

In her day-to-day job as a set designer, Adi Goodrich constructs elaborate environments with her crew on set or in the studio, but the rest of world experiences her work only through photographs. As of last night, however, you can view the Los Angeles designer's work IRL in an installation on view until the end of December at The Standard, Hollywood hotel.

11.19.14

Studio Visit

Egg Collective, Furniture Designers

When Egg Collective launched their debut furniture collection at ICFF in 2012 — snagging a Best New Designer award in the process — they seemed to the design world to have come out of nowhere. And in fact, though the three — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — met and began collaborating as 18-year-old freshmen at Washington University's architecture school more than a decade ago, the truth is they had formally joined forces and had begun crafting an ICFF plan only six months earlier. "I remember the three of us sitting outside the Javits Center in our Budget truck, about to move in furniture that we’d been working on with no one having seen for six months," says Beamer. "I was like, you guys, this is it. People could just walk by us the entire fair. But thankfully we seem to have struck a chord and the work resonated."

11.17.14

Sighted

Meredith Turnbull, artist

A few Saturdays ago, we featured Australian artist Meredith Turnbull's incredible, powder-coated brass jewelry, but today we wanted to turn your attention to her equally terrific art practice. Navigating her website, we became intrigued by images of totemic metallic structures that were nevertheless labeled as photography. We asked Turnbull herself to clarify: "My practice as an artist has really been shaped by my training: first studying photography, then doing a degree in Art History, then later a degree in Fine Art specializing in gold and silversmithing. This affected the way I work and made me very interested in ideas in and around discipline, functionality, art and design history, and of course context! I'm preoccupied with theories and ideas about purposeful objects and their relationship to people as well as new contexts for those ideas. So I make objects across a variety of scales. Sometimes I photograph these but only exhibit the photograph; sometimes I show small objects alongside larger installation work. I'm always trying to work with scale and the context in which I'm exhibiting."

11.15.14

Saturday Selects

Week of November 10, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, it's almost time to start gifting! We've got high and low lights, artist-edition shoes, affordable trays by one of our favorite designers, and a pop-up shop filled with a collector's curiosities.

11.12.14

Sighted

Marten Elder in 01 Magazine

Sometimes you have to laugh at your own predictability. It was love at first sight when I first saw these images of Los Angeles photographer Marten Elder's work in the fantastic new issue of 01 Magazine (which also features SU faves like Oeuffice and Doug Johnston). But when I began to read the article, it became immediately clear to me why: Elder studied at Bard College, where his senior project advisor was Stephen Shore, another visual fascination of mine. But while Elder's older work is more like Shore's in its exquisitely faithful representation of a banal reality, his newer work represents a more color-saturated view of those equally ordinary vistas (a concrete street corner, a stack of scaffolding.) The accompanying interview is great, so we're excerpted part of it, as well as our favorite images, here. Go to 01's current issue for the full article, then visit Elder's website for even more images.