Home Up and Coming
02.28.14

Sighted

Equilibrio Frágil y Simétrico by Cristian Montesinos

For his ongoing series of miniature totems, Barcelona-based graphic and furniture designer Cristian Montesinos collects and paints scraps of found wood, which he keeps on hand for the assembly and photographing of each piece. "Biking or walking in Barcelona I always find what I need," he says. "I keep the pieces, classified by size, and use them when I need them. When I work with these woods, I feel I'm returning to them a part of the dignity that was lost when they were thrown away. When I paint them I try not to completely cover the material, as part of the idea is to show and appreciate the tangible past of the object."
More
02.19.14

Up and Coming

Visibility, Product Designers

Sina Sohrab was born in Tehran and raised in Detroit; Joseph Guerra is a native Los Angeleno who grew up outside Atlanta. Yet when the pair met as undergrads at RISD, their backgrounds turned out to be their most influential commonality: "There was this emphasis in both our families on earning your possessions and respecting them — it's something we really connected on," recalls Sohrab. "Joey’s dad, for example, had this idea that he wanted all of his possessions to reference an older possession he'd had at another point in his life. This timeline of objects and the idea of emotional value became really important to us." Upon graduating in 2012, the duo knew they wanted to team up; Sohrab moved to New York and took a job at Bec Brittain studio, while Guerra spent six months in Europe working for Industrial Facility and Big-Game before joining him. They're now hunkered down in Brooklyn preparing to launch their first collaborative collection during ICFF in May, under the name Visibility.
More
02.17.14

Fair Report

At Stockholm Design Week 2014

When Katrin Greiling offered to report on Stockholm Design Week for us this year, it felt like the holy trinity of guest fair coverage: a designer with an amazing eye, who also happened to be a talented photographer, who wasn't too occupied exhibiting her own work this year to make the rounds on our behalf. Turns out she's been busy with other projects, 700 miles away from her former home base: "After living in Sweden for 15 years, I recently made a move to Berlin to work on two interior projects," Greiling says. "Still, though, my heart is strongly connected to the aesthetics of the North, and a year without going to the furniture fair in Stockholm would be unthinkable for me. Studio Greiling didn't show any work at the 2014 fair, but we still enjoyed meeting up with all the members of our huge Nordic furniture family. Here's a glimpse at what I saw during the four days I spent in Stockholm."
More
02.15.14

Saturday Selects

Week of February 10, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: sculptures made from deconstructed window blinds and laminate floors, a book on vintage corporate identity design manuals, a series of fake Cuban shop windows (pictured above), and the most excitement we've ever experienced over a bar of soap.
More
01.31.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Thaddeus Wolfe: Unsurfacing at Volume Gallery

Thaddeus Wolfe's Assemblage vases looked mysterious enough when he debuted them in 2011, first for sale with Matter and then with a special edition for Chicago's Volume Gallery — we'd never seen glass before that paired the shape and surface texture of rocks and minerals with amazing fades of opaque color. When we asked him to describe his process to us, it turned out that it was relatively easy to grasp, if not execute: He blew the vessels into faceted plaster-and-silicon molds. His newest take on the series — the Unsurfacing collection for Volume, on view as of tonight — looks even more complicated, layered with fragmented geometric patterns and contrasting colors.
More
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.
More
01.18.14

Saturday Selects

Week of January 13, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: vintage Brooklyn hipster interiors, shelves inspired by Venetian bridges, a new website for Josef and Anni Albers, Sottsass Bacterio bookends (above), and more.
More
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.
More
01.09.14

Up and Coming

Josephine Choquet, Designer

As longtime talent scouts in the field of design, we can say this with absolute confidence: There are only a handful of schools out there whose students consistently produce well-resolved, magazine-ready work. ECAL, of course, is one of them, and you'll see several of its recent grads on Sight Unseen in the coming months, starting with today's interview with Joséphine Choquet. We featured one of the French talent's projects just before the holidays — a line of acetate sunglasses made in collaboration with another ECAL up-and-comer, Virgile Thévoz — but wanted to come back and finish the job with a short profile cementing her status as one to watch. Like many young designers these days, Choquet is particularly interested in old craft techniques and simple materials, which she then marries with her love of line, pattern, and contemporary art. Check out some of her past and present work after the jump.
More
01.04.14

Saturday Selects

Week of December 30, 2013

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and events from the past seven or so days. This week: psychedelic design prints, Bruno Munari masks, ombre ceramic raindrops, interior landscapes by Jonas Wood (pictured above), and more.
More
12.24.13

Up and Coming

Studio AH–HA, Graphic Designers

Working as a design journalist confers some pretty amazing benefits — travel to international design fairs, VIP invitations to parties, the occasional holiday gift — but this, right here, is hands down our favorite part of the job: discovering something so new and exciting we get a rush just from being the first to be able to share it with you. We originally met Portuguese graphic designer Catarina Carreiras a few years ago during the Milan Furniture Fair, where she was helping staff the installation of her then-employer, Fabrica, and we've kept in touch with her ever since; in 2011 she joined forces with fellow designer (and OMA alum) Carolina Cantante to start the communication and design agency Studio AH—HA, which now operates out of Sam Baron's office in Lisbon. Carreiras still does work for Sam and Fabrica, but as of this very story, she and Cantante are officially announcing the existence of their burgeoning practice — and its brand new website — to the rest of the world. You'll want to stare at the duo's gorgeous work for ages; seeing as it's the last story we'll be posting until January 2 as we embark our annual holiday hiatus, you'll have plenty of time to do just that. Happy new year, and enjoy!
More
12.16.13

Sighted

Daniel Entonado, Illustrator

Daniel Entonado is a Madrid-based illustrator, textile designer, and graphic designer whose drawings are dense, whimsical, and often totem-like. We stumbled on his work randomly on Instagram, but apparently according to some he's the "zine king of Madrid" — check out selections from his portfolio below, then see one of his zines in action on Vimeo.
More