09.11.13

The Making of

Nick Ross’s Objects of Ambiquity Series

In the fictional narrative behind his Objects of Ambiquity series, Nick Ross is a designer from the future who's been hired by a history museum called The Institution to work as an "object mediator," delving into the origins and possible uses of any mysterious artifacts the rest of the staff can't identify. When he presented the project at the Konstfack graduate thesis show earlier this year — including his White Lies table (pictured above), A Mirror Darkly, and Baltic Gold shelves — he staged the presentation as if it were a snapshot from The Institution itself, his pieces being among the targets of his imagined discovery process. "The story of Objects of Ambiquity is a vessel used to highlight the role of fiction within historical records," says Ross. "While doing this, it simultaneously questions the designer’s possible future role within this context and how this will alter our understanding of what a museum is."

09.06.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Jonathan Muecke for Volume Gallery

Jonathan Muecke makes me anxious. I love his work so much, but I don't entirely know what it means. I love his work so much, but he barely makes any of it. I love his work so much, but I don't understand what he's doing up there in Minneapolis, keeping mostly to himself. However I suppose it's appropriate that he would cultivate the same cool, detached, mysterious air as his pieces, which — when I interviewed him for W magazine back in 2011, the first time he launched a collection with Volume Gallery — he described as "relational objects," things with unfamiliar but contextual functions like "scrambling everything in a room" or "behaving like a mass — something you don't really want to think about." To that end it may be equally appropriate (if not semi-amusing) that on the occasion of Muecke's second show with Volume, opening tonight in Chicago, curators Sam Vinz and Claire Warner asked a psychiatrist rather than a writer to interview him for the catalog, who probed him about equalizing and collapsing before concluding that "I find everything we’ve discussed completely logical, yet strange ... in the true sense of something not yet encountered, or still unknown." We've excerpted a few key moments from the conversation between Muecke and Dr. Brian Stonehocker after the jump, alongside images of all six pieces from the new series.

09.03.13

Up and Coming

James Shaw, Furniture Designer

I recently wrote an article for a forthcoming issue of Architectural Digest on the London talent Anton Alvarez, whose Thread-Wrapping Machine has captivated the design world as of late, and in it, his gallerist Libby Sellers makes the point that what's so of the moment about his work is that he isn't just making objects, he's making the object that makes the objects. And it's so true: Many of the more interesting young designers we've come across in the past few years have been the ones shifting their focus towards developing their own weird and wonderful production processes, like Silo Studio for instance. There's just something about this unexpected inventiveness that captures people's curiosity, which explains why the latest project by newcomer James Shaw — a series of homemade "guns" that spray or extrude materials into or onto furnishings — went viral on the design blogs shortly after he presented it at his RCA graduation show. In work like his, it's about the journey, not just the destination. So Sight Unseen, right?

08.23.13

American Design Hot List

Our 2013 Honorees

Last week on L'Arcobaleno, Jill was asked to cover the recent rebirth of New York design, discussing the transformation with key players like Jason Miller, Lindsey Adelman, and Dave Alhadeff. "Once again there’s a scene that’s celebrated internationally," said Alhadeff, and we couldn't agree more — ever since we founded the Noho Design District in 2010, which is largely devoted to American talents, we have been asked countless times by global designers and journalists to share our take on all the exciting things happening on our home turf, and we're always happy to oblige. After a while, though, it got us thinking: Why wait for people to ask? Why not create an easy resource we can share with everyone? And so, introducing the American Design Hot List, a totally unscientific, unapologetically subjective portfolio of the emerging and semi-emerging furniture and product designers we think you should know now.

08.19.13

Up and Coming

David Kirshoff, Designer

If New York designer David Kirshoff's bright, blobby lamps and chairs have an element of the grotesque to them, to some degree it was fated: “I was raised around a shop that makes special effects for movies and TV, where my brother and I used to hide out and coat each other with fake blood,” says the 25-year-old Pratt grad. “I’ve been welding and machining, blowing things up, setting things on fire, and most importantly, making things with my hands since I was a little kid. That’s how I learned to be a craftsman.” Thanks to these formative experiences, Kirshoff developed a healthy knack for experimentation, and for not being afraid to work outside the normal boundaries of form and function. We discovered his wacky work through Zoe Fisher, whose upcoming Handjob Gallery Store project includes a special edition of his lamps. We'll be helping Fisher launch her entire collection very soon, but in the meantime, you can get a sneak peek by way of our interview with Kirshoff after the jump.

07.30.13

Sighted

Ben Medansky Studio Visit on Los Angeles, I’m Yours

It's a quiet summer week here at Sight Unseen HQ. August is approaching, we're spending more and more weekends out of the city, and the time in between them is becoming increasingly shorter and less productive. But that doesn't mean we don't know from hard work — we've spent the last four years pouring inordinate amounts of time and effort into the stories on this site, and so we're all the more sympathetic when we see other blogs doing the same. Case in point: the ridiculously extensive, print mag–worthy interview with ceramicist Ben Medansky we spotted recently on the blog Los Angeles, I'm Yours, a city-centric cultural resource founded in 2011 by The Fox Is Black's Bobby Solomon with editor Kyle Fitzpatrick. We've excerpted part of it here, along with a selection of the accompanying studio photos.

07.26.13

Up and Coming

Katie Stout, Furniture Designer

What were you doing at age 24? Muddling through grad school? Working as a CAD monkey? Moving back in with your parents? If so, you might be more than a little jealous of recent RISD grad Katie Stout, who at that tender age already holds the post of gallery director at New York's Johnson Trading Gallery, where Paul Johnson not only represents her work but encourages her to introduce him to that of her peers (like Noho Next alum and future SU subject Misha Kahn, for example). Before she landed the job, Stout's only previous employment was a one-summer college internship for the novelty housewares brand Fred and Friends: "I showed the creative director my portfolio, and when he saw a table I'd made as a sophomore that was an udder with milk squirting out of its teats, he asked me what I was on," she recalls. "Obviously I said nothing."

07.10.13

Up and Coming

Pauline Deltour, Product and Furniture Designer

Okay, let's get this out of the way as quickly as possible: Yes, Pauline Deltour spent a few years as a designer in Konstantin Grcic's studio. And yes, Grcic may have made a few strategic phone calls on her behalf, jumpstarting her career once she struck out on her own in 2009. But considering that was four years ago, and the 30-year-old Paris-based talent has since turned out more than a few painfully elegant designs for the likes of Discipline and Kvadrat, we thought it was worth stating for the record that she's become quite the rising star in her own right — not to mention one of design's most promising new female voices. We checked in with Deltour, who describes her practice as aspiring to create "self-evident" objects, to find out what she's been up to lately.

07.08.13

Sighted

Q+A With London Textile Designer Hannah Waldron

If I was a bit late to the Hannah Waldron party, only discovering her work in May at the Here & There exhibition that Field and Various Projects put on during our Noho Design District event, it's probably only because I have a deep, embarrassing secret that, until today, I've never admitted publicly: I don't know why, but I just don't like most contemporary illustration all that much, particularly when it's figurative. Which means that I can sometimes throw the baby out with the bathwater, failing to notice the work I do love because I'm so busy filtering out the work I don't. Waldron definitely falls into the former camp for me, probably because she has such an intricate, graphic style — she's more influenced by the Bauhaus, for example, than the aesthetics of street art or cartooning. The woven Map Tapestries she exhibited at Here & There (and previously at Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan this past April) feature long, abstract representations of her journeys from one place to another, plotting the transition in landscape between, say, Tokyo and a hot spring in Japan's Gunma prefecture (pictured above). Check out some of Waldron's works in this lovely Q+A, excerpted below, that ran recently on Designboom.

06.03.13

Fair Report

At New York Design Week 2013, Part V: The Rest

New York Design Week may already feel like a distant memory, but we couldn't move on to covering the upcoming Design Miami Basel fair — or start publishing all the amazing studio visits and house tours we've been saving up for the past few weeks — without doing one last post about all the offsite shows we saw (and didn't see) during this year's ICFF. From magnified eyeballs to garbage arches to our favorite watering can of all time, check out the official Sight Unseen roundup below.

05.30.13

Fair Report

At New York Design Week 2013, Part IV: ICFF

We had a dream for ICFF this year: to set up a "Sight Unseen Canteen" staffed by an avant-garde chef who would purchase food items from the conference center cafeteria and recast them into amazing gourmet meals, a bit like the now-defunct website Fancy Fast Food. The reason we had this dream (which we still hope to someday realize) is that no one in their right mind ever has anything good to say about the Javits itself — the climate, the lighting, and of course, the hideous, overpriced cuisine — and so pretty much everyone, we figured, would get the joke. If we could add on a foot massage station, a napping pod, and a daylight simulator, our vision would truly be complete. But alas, this year all there was to comfort weary fairgoers like us was plain old great design, and the joy of running into old friends and colleagues, and so we had no choice but to settle for that. We came, we saw, we conquered.

05.28.13

Fair Report

At New York Design Week 2013, Part III: Jambox at Noho Next

This year's Noho Next show didn't just look amazing — it sounded amazing, too. That's because in the exhibition's flagship space, Sight Unseen created a special installation for Noho Design District sponsor Jawbone, a kind of video listening area decked out not only with the brand's latest wireless speakers, but with an array of furnishings and objects culled from some of our very favorite designers — from Paul Loebach to Tom Dixon. Styled with the help of Seattle's Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, the space invited Noho Next visitors to kick back, relax, and experience the sound of Jawbone's latest BIG JAMBOXES, which are newly available in more than 100 customizable color combinations. Check out the setup after the jump, plus watch the seven designer-made videos that Sight Unseen hand-picked to screen over the weekend.