01.30.13

The Making of

Shatter Vases by Pete Oyler and Misha Kahn for Assembly

If you have a great design sense, and if you enjoy sending people flowers, you've probably noticed by now that the two don't exactly tend to play well together. Unless you're clued into a place like The Sill, our new favorite Brooklyn-based succulent delivery service, you know your lucky recipient is most likely going to receive their posies in some boring glass trifle that will inevitably end up in the freebie box at his or her next garage sale. That's why when young designers Misha Kahn and Pete Oyler hit up a Salvation Army looking for castoff vessels to experiment with for their latest project, they had absolutely no trouble filling up their cart. It's tough out there for a generic FTD vase, especially one whose emptiness eventually reminds you of a failed relationship or a hospital stay. Kahn and Oyler decided that, just in time for Valentine's Day, they'd take their thrifted castoffs and give them new lives as objets d'art, filling them with colored resin and shattering them in place (hence the name).

01.23.13

Invitation

Kelly Rakowski’s “Life With Max Lamb Prism”

Here at Sight Unseen, we're a bit like a college application — fixated on versatility, and in awe of anyone who's proven themselves equally gifted across a spectrum of interests and activities. So it's no wonder we became fast friends with someone like Kelly Rakowski, who studied graphics, worked as a book designer for Todd Oldham for five years, started a blog revolving around her obsession with archival textiles, and now makes weavings, housewares, and jewelry as one half of the label New Friends. She's an artist, a designer, and a stylist, and when we asked her to art-direct a special editorial featuring Max Lamb's Prism Bangle — commissioned by us for the Sight Unseen Shop — it was no surprise that she understood our vision immediately. Max's bangle, after all, is way more than just a bangle; it began life as a sculptural object and was adapted for us to wearable proportions, but it still feels just as at home on a desk as it does around your wrist or hanging from your neck. For this slideshow, Rakowski imagined several creative uses for the Prism's four discrete parts, from spaghetti dosing to cookie-cutting, then photographed her ideas in action.

01.21.13

Sighted

Matthew Ronay on You Have Been Here Sometime

Long Island City, New York, is a vibrant up-and-coming neighborhood, home to MoMA PS1 and more than a few buzzy new restaurants. But it's also quite industrial, and prone to long, lonely stretches of aesthetic drabness that can alienate the casual visitor. The last time I toured an artist's studio there, nearly a decade ago, it was a woman who painted eye-poppingly bright, striated color fields almost compulsively, as if to insulate herself from the world outside her door. I don't purport to know Matthew Ronay's relationship with his adopted surroundings — he was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1976 — but his paintings and sculptures certainly add up to one big escapist fantasy: His last big show in New York, at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2011, was a three-dimensional enchanted forest populated with unidentifiable creatures and eyeball trees, while his latest work revolves around a wall that he imagines to be a portal to another world, perhaps one that looks less like a dreary factory yard and more like a sunny idyll. Maybe that's why Los Angeles designer and Sight Unseen pal David John is so drawn to it? John interviewed Ronay last week on his cult blog, You Have Been Here Sometime, and invited imminent Sight Unseen contributor Brian Ferry to shoot the artist's studio.

01.15.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Das Wilde Denken: Depot Basel in Berlin

There's an easy way to tell whether or not you were born to be a maker: sit down at a table piled with random junk and scraps of material, and see how long it takes you to conjure something useful and/or beautiful. For the Das Wilde Denken workshop last month, Matylda Krzykowski and the team behind Depot Basel joined forces with my favorite design/fashion boutique in Berlin, Baerck, and invited a handful of local designers to spend two days doing just that. The results, of course, were amazing — where an observer like myself couldn't really make the mental leap past a jumble of discarded trolley wheels and wooden boards, this group envisioned lamps, sculptural table mirrors, jewelry trays, and stationery sets. The curators saw it as a chance for the designers to get back to basics and enjoy the simplicity of an open-ended crafting session, but they also likened the experience to reconnecting with childhood, when making wasn't goal-oriented but immediate and spontaneous — hence the name Das Wilde Denken, which means "wild thinking." (Momentary flashback to Malin Gabriela Nordin's children's workshop, which we featured last month.) All of the pieces created during the session, a selection of which are featured in the slideshow after the jump, will be on view and for sale at Baerck through February 2.

01.11.13

Studio Visit

Silo Studio, Furniture Designers

Oscar Wanless and Attua Aparicio certainly aren’t the first design students to have clashed with an industrial manufacturer, showing up the so-called experts by proving a seemingly impossible process quite possible after all. But the RCA grads—who now collaborate as Silo Studio—are certainly the first we’ve heard of whose triumph so impressed said manufacturer that they were asked to move into the factory. At an industrial park 45 minutes outside the center of London, Silo operates out of a small warehouse room on the premises of Jablite, the U.K.'s largest maker of styrofoam insulation panels. “They’ve got steam, which is how we produce what we produce,” explains Wanless, that being lumpy polystyrene furnishings once compared to “stage scenery for a production of Hansel and Gretel on acid.”

01.03.13

Sighted

The Fancy World by Matt Paweski

If there was ever a time when artists and designers could remain shrouded, Wizard of Oz-like, behind a curtain of mystery and intrigue, that time — partly thanks to sites like ours — is almost certainly past. Granted most artists still don't have their own websites, and most of their galleries are pitiful at conveying background info, but this being the information age, some blogger or curator never fails to come along and connect the dots. In the case of Matt Paweski, it may very well end up being Sight Unseen that gets to do the honors. While the Los Angeles–based artist is showing an exciting new body of work called "The Fancy World" at South Willard at the moment, so far there's very little to be gleaned about him anywhere online. We fell so in love with the new pieces, which are furniture-like in form if not entirely in function, that we set the wheels in motion for a more in-depth studio visit with Paweski in the spring. You'll get to know him better at that point, but for now, the Michigan-born talent was kind enough to tell us more about "The Fancy World," whose pieces are pictured in this post: "The fine line between something working or not is a place my work constantly returns to," he says.

12.21.12

The Making of

Archivo Diario by Melinda Santillan and Marco Rountree Cruz

If you're the kind of person who pays attention to Pinterest, you may have spotted the playful image above making the rounds there as of late. But we can pretty much guarantee you don't know the story of the two Mexican artists who created it — and the blog it's pulled from, Archivo Diario — which turns out to be one of the more amusing tales we've heard in awhile. We were lucky enough to meet Marco Rountree Cruz and Melinda Santillan at a party thrown this fall by Jennilee Marigomen of 01 Magazine, and we decided to keep in touch with the Mexico City–based couple, who launched Archivo Diario three months ago both as a way to force themselves to create something new every day and to try their hand at working together (Cruz being a successful installation artist and Santillan more of an art director). But when we dug a little deeper, we found out that the endeavor was technically their second collaboration, and was in many ways a direct reaction to the failure of first: an elaborate script for a stylized telenovela that they dreamed of actually producing, but that has since languished in their desk drawer. We were so impressed by the couple's boundless creative ambitions — just wait until you hear about the crazy project Cruz is working on now — that we begged them to tell us everything

12.20.12

Up and Coming

Fabien Cappello, Furniture Designer

Whatever Fabien Cappello's studies at ECAL may have taught him about luxury, his subsequent grad degree at the RCA may have un-taught him: The London-based designer has made stools carved from trashed Christmas trees, Venetian glass vessels melted onto lowly bricks, and benches constructed from shipping pallets or punctuated with cheap street-vendors' umbrellas. That's not to say, of course, that Cappello's work isn't high end — it's been shown at the likes of Libby Sellers Gallery and has won him an Elle Decoration New Designers Award — just that the materials and ideas he sees value in wouldn't exactly be considered the norm. If he's come a long way since setting up his own studio in 2009, it's because his focus on local and overlooked resources has captured the curiosity of the design world, not just its eyes or its wallets. That said, with the world headed where it's headed, his style of economical chic may become the new luxury before long, so we figured he was worth checking in with. He gave Sight Unseen a quick glimpse into his practice below.

12.14.12

Q+A

Morgan Peck at Totokaelo

When Jill Wenger opened the first incarnation of the Seattle store Totokaelo in 2003, she had a few goals: showcasing the work of local designers, improving choices for all-weather gear. But as she grew to be the most fashion-forward resource in the city, she took on the more important mandate of helping to raise Seattle’s style profile in general, banishing annoying sartorial habits like square-toed shoes, embroidery, and pleather handbags. While there’s still work to be done in that arena, this year — with the opening of her massive new store and its “Art—Object” component — Wenger expanded her tastemaking activities beyond the body and into the home. Her stable contains more than a few of our favorite players, from Philip Low to Seattle’s hometown heroes Iacoli & McAllister, but months ago, it was Morgan Peck who really caught our eye. Not only was the ceramicist suddenly showing up on shelves at Iko Iko and Mociun, among others, there was almost no information about her on the web. And so we invited Wenger to take a stab at interviewing the Los Angeles–based talent for our Peer Review column.

12.04.12

Up and Coming

Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, Furniture and Product Designers

After Jean Lee met Dylan Davis while studying industrial design at the University of Washington, and after a string of successful school collaborations led them to start dating, the two of them did a semester abroad together in Rome. “Those were the good times,” laughs Lee. “We saw all these independent studios there, and designers working more as artists, and it was really inspiring for us. That wasn't happening at all in Seattle.” And so after they graduated in 2005, Lee went on to work for a messenger bag company based in Philadelphia, while Davis joined the team at Henrybuilt. They did a small trade selling vintage finds on Etsy for awhile, and eventually started repurposing those objects into new designs as a hobby. But what finally led them to join forces as Ladies & Gentlemen in 2009 were the first signs that they might be able to find in Seattle what they experienced in Rome after all: Not only had studios like Iacoli & Mcallister and Grain begun to flourish by making and selling their own work, their new coalition Join was gathering together local designers to collaborate and exhibit together. “Jamie Iacoli asked us to contribute to a show, and were like ‘What the hell? Let’s do it!’”

11.29.12

The Making of

Malin Gabriella Nordin’s Children’s Workshop

Malin Gabriela Nordin isn’t the type who’d be quick to align herself with an art movement — the 24-year-old prefers to stay as insulated as possible from outside influences, which is why she left her friends and family in Stockholm four years ago to attend art school in comparably tiny Bergen, Norway. But as it turns out, Nordin is something of a Surrealist, at least from where we’re standing: Everything about her process is geared towards connecting with her subconscious, from letting her sculptures develop intuitively and spontaneously to painting with quick-dry acrylics, eliminating any lag between her mind and the canvas. And then there’s her obsession with children. “My work has to do with reconstructing fragments from memories, and I've been working with my own childhood a lot,” she says. “I think of kids at that age as more free.” It’s that notion that led Dalí and Picasso to pay homage to the creativity of the pint-sized, and that led Nordin to make them the subject of her senior graduation project, inviting eleven children to participate in her artistic process.

11.16.12

Q+A

Caroline Achaintre on Arcademi

The biggest reason why we love our new Peer Review column: because it lets us heap mountains of credit onto blogs like Arcademi — the source of more of our "holy shit" moments than almost any other site — while giving us good reason to borrow their content. Namely, the opportunity to hear their subjects wax poetic about things like hairy tufting and multiple personalities, like today's subject, Caroline Achaintre. We were lucky enough to convince Arcademi editor Moritz Firchow to interview the London-based artist, who trained as a blacksmith before finding her way to a multidisciplinary practice inspired by the way German expressionism, post-war British sculpture, and Primitivism merge influences from both ancient and modern culture.