Sight Unseen

The Projectionist

Jill Singer — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:27:03 +0000

Gordon Brinckle, the late, eccentric subject of a new photography book called The Projectionist, was an outsider artist to be sure: A small-town projectionist at the local movie theater, Brinckle spent his free time sketching and constructing a small-scale movie palace called the Shalimar in the basement of his Middletown, Delaware, home. (Which we suppose makes him more like an outsider artist, designer, architect, and engineer all rolled into one.) Photographed and written by Kendall Messick, a filmmaker who grew up across the street from the Brinckle family, the book documents the artist and his process, mixing photographs of Brinckle’s fully realized creation with original artwork, architectural plans, sketches, and linoleum prints of ticket stubs and uniform designs. Brinckle had some vocational training but was otherwise self-taught, and the book is a fascinating glimpse at how an artist can work in a vacuum and yet still mimic the methods used by designers far and wide.

Pascale Gueracague, Helmut Lang Textile Designer

Monica Khemsurov — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:56:32 +0000

It's funny, although not altogether inaccurate, to picture a girl like Pascale Gueracague digging around in the trash — she's all long hair, winning smile, French parents, and Margiela bags, and at just 26 years old, she's spent the last three years catapulting to the head of textile design at Helmut Lang. But in her prints as well as the paintings she makes in her spare time, she works with some of the most banal materials imaginable — plastic bags, baby powder, rubber cement — and because she sees beauty in them that others tend to miss, that often entails liberating them from the rubbish pile. "That's how I've learned to design since I was a kid," she explains. "I came from a big family with no money, so I was always drawing on the inside of a cereal box." Of course, Gueracague's artistic gifts lay in the alchemy that happens next, when she's layering and manipulating those materials into rich compositions that evoke her new-age-meets-industrial-chic aesthetic.

J. & L. Lobmeyr

Jill Singer — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:16:20 +0000

Since its founding six generations ago, Lobmeyr has tended to follow its own compass rather than listening to the whims of the market — in other words, it’s never been afraid to be a little bit different. It’s why the company moved from its original role as glass merchants to manufacturers; what inspired a relationship with the radical designers of the Wiener Werkstätte; and why the company today collaborates with designers like Polka, whose 2008 beer glasses boast an engraving based on the goals scored during a 1978 soccer match between Austria and Germany.

AvroKo’s Anglo-Asian Influences

Monica Khemsurov — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:33:49 +0000

For the designers behind AvroKo, the New York firm known for its high-concept restaurant interiors, the most personal projects often start out as group obsessions. Lately, apropos of nothing, they’ve been compiling a collection of silent video clips featuring modern furniture or architecture, snipped from movies or pulled from obscure design archives. So far it’s just a game — “a meme floating around the office,” as partner Kristina O’Neal puts it — but the first time the team was so possessed, they began with a bank of photographs and ended up opening a restaurant. After securing several projects in Asia a few years back, they began carefully documenting the bizarre cultural mash-ups they found while on trips out East, from mangled English translations to neon-lit religious altars; in 2008 they opened Double Crown in New York's East Village as an homage to their Anglo-Asian fascination, with food evoking the 19th-century British occupation of India, China, and Singapore. With a new AvroKo office in Hong Kong fielding projects like the recently opened New York–style eatery Lily in Bloom, their anthropological depository keeps growing.

Jason Rosenberg, Artist

Jill Singer — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:55:11 +0000

The first time I met Brooklyn artist Jason Rosenberg, I brought him a present. It was nothing fancy. Earlier that day, I’d gone to the doctor and left with a prescription tucked inside a tiny plastic pharmaceutical bag, printed with a picture of a pill and the name of a generic medication. Lest my gift-giving skills be called into question, I should explain that I was headed that night to Kiosk, the New York shop where Rosenberg was hosting a Plastic Bag Happening: The idea was to bring a bag and either exchange it for one of the many Rosenberg has collected over the years, or to have the artist, equipped with his vintage White sewing machine, transform the bag into something totally different — a hat, a pencil case, a coin purse, a wallet. I walked away with two slim sacks from Systembolaget, Sweden’s chain of state-sponsored liquor shops; Rosenberg, when I visited him in his Greenpoint studio last month, was still holding on to the bag I’d brought, though where to find it in his heaps of pseudo-organized boxes, bins, and file folders was another story.

Katharina Trudzinski, Artist

Monica Khemsurov — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:58:24 +0000

When Hamburg-based artist and textile designer Katharina Trudzinski decided to take a second residence in Berlin this spring, she found an inexpensive live-work space on the fringes of the up-and-coming Neuköln neighborhood — the city’s equivalent of Bushwick, Brooklyn — and saved two months’ rent by promising the landlord she’d renovate. But it was imagination, not thrift, that inspired her next move: After stripping the wood paneling from the walls and ceilings and tearing down a few ill-conceived door frames, she began painting the detritus and incorporating it into her sculptural installations and high-relief paintings. Made from constellations of scraps, street finds, and everyday junk cloaked in perfectly calibrated hues, her work — some of which becomes inspiration for the pieces in her clothing line — is meant to dialogue with its surroundings. “It’s not my intent that the materials should be cheap, I just like to use things that are around me,” she says. “I like to start with what I’ve got.”

Art in the Age

Jill Singer — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:44:07 +0000

When Philadelphia adman Steven Grasse talks about his 20 years at the helm of Gyro Worldwide, the successful agency he shuttered in 2008, his assessment is as blunt as you might expect from the man who invented Bikini Bandits, a video series about strippers, guns, and hot rods: “I was the asshole who did the Camel ads,” he says. “At Gyro, we had this ‘I’ll fuck anything that moves’ philosophy.” That all changed in 2008, when he sold Sailor Jerry — the rum brand he created before going on to help develop Hendrick's Gin — to William Grant & Sons for “more money than I ever made in advertising,” he says. Grasse quickly changed the name of his agency to Quaker City Mercantile, and transformed its mission completely. “Now we only work on brands that we create and own or with clients I truly like personally,” he says. The most personal of those projects is Art in the Age, the Old City store and liquor brand Grasse began working on the day he sold Sailor Jerry.

Enter the CB2 The Selby is in your place contest

The Editors — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:46:31 +0000

It's no wonder The Selby is a Sight Unseen favorite: Photographer Todd Selby has shot some of the world's most respected artists and designers behind-the-scenes, in their own personal spaces, surrounded by their tools and inspirations — from Mike Mills and Tom Sachs to Philippe Starck and Emmanuel Perrotin. Now the folks at CB2, one of our go-to destinations for affordable modern home furnishings, have teamed up with The Selby to hold a contest for the most creative living space — meaning your place could be next. The grand-prize winner gets a $10,000 CB2 shop card, plus a private shoot with Selby to be featured on his blog. (Don't forget to clean your bathtub, in case he asks you to hop in.)

To Live in a Schindler House, by Pin-Up Editor Felix Burrichter

Monica Khemsurov — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:53:39 +0000

In March, Pin-Up magazine editor Felix Burrichter packed his bags and left New York for an extended stay in Los Angeles, where he met up with the Vienna artist Sarah Ortmeyer. Chosen for one of four annual residencies with Vienna's Museum for Applied Arts (MAK) — whose L.A. branch is based in architect Rudolph Schindler's 1922 Kings Road House — the pair have spent the intervening months shacked up in a two-bedroom apartment at the museum's Mackey building, working on a joint project they'll present on September 10. Called "XXX BURRICHTER ORTMEYER," its main element is a publication focused on the mercurial relationship between Schindler and his wife; Burrichter has also taken advantage of the proximity to give the fall issue of Pin-Up an L.A. theme. Architecture buff that he is, we got to wondering how else he'd been inspired by his surroundings, so we invited him to share with us the experience of living in the recently renovated Mackey building, whose five apartments Schindler built in his trademark style in 1939. "It’s like living in a little museum," he says. "At first we were like, this is crazy, but it’s really the perfect apartment, even though it’s so basic. We’ve been here for four and a half months now, and the longer we stay, the more we realize how well thought-out it is."

Everyday Growing by Juliette Warmenhoven

Monica Khemsurov — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:18:26 +0000

Juliette Warmenhoven grew up in Holland’s so-called bulb district, near Haarlem, in a small village called Hillegom. Her father is a flower farmer. If it all sounds very quaint, it might have been 20 years ago — but then tulip production went the way of the meat industry thanks to globalization, and farming became a race to create the maximum amount of homogenous bulbs in the shortest amount of time. “My father feels farming is like working in a factory now,” says the Arnhem-based designer. Just as shrink-wrapped steak has been divorced from the killing of the cow, plants are more about the perfection of the end product than the actual growing process. “I believe that when you explain that process to people, they get more feeling out of it,” she says. For Everyday Growing, her graduation project at Arnhem’s ArtEZ school, she built a series of small monuments to plants’ humble — and often imperfect — origins.