Sight Unseen

Studio Visit: Emily Counts, Artist

Ali Moran — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:48:31 +0000

Portland is a place where, so the saying goes, the ’90s are alive and well. And it may very well be the only place that could have spawned an artist like Emily Counts, who deals with the self-reflective nostalgia of outdated technological innovations once found in her childhood home: dial-up telephones sculpted in porcelain and stoneware, a life-size fax machine, an interactive Mac SE computer made from walnut, casting epoxy, glass, porcelain, copper, and electrical wiring that acts as a two-way mirror after a button is pressed on the keyboard, lighting up the sculpture’s interior. “I’m interested in the mystery of these inventions that we seem to take for granted in our everyday life,” says the 35-year-old Seattle native, who we first spotted on photographer Carlie Armstrong’s blog Work.Place. “For me, there’s a thin line between technology and magic.”

Sighted: Found Objects at RoAndCo

Monica Khemsurov — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:20:26 +0000

Sighted today on the blog of RoAndCo — the up-and-coming, ADC-award-winning design agency run by our friend Roanne Adams — a beautifully presented series of old treasures discovered under a client's floorboards. Writes Adams: "All too often our NYC paced lifestyles make it easy to forget that the buildings we walk by and work in every day have stories to tell. Our friends and clients at Projective Space recently found some treasures hidden under floorboards while renovating their new Lower East Side space, and we thought they were too beautiful to not share! We did a little research and found that both cigarette boxes date back to 1910 and feature artwork inspired by Owen Jones, a London-born architect who reproduced the ornate designs he found while traveling in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and India. We thought it was pretty funny that the design for the Turkish Cigarettes packaging clearly took its style cues from Egypt. The Juicy Fruit wrapper and matchbooks all date back to the 1920s. One of the matchbooks actually has an ad for life insurance: $5,000 worth of coverage for 5 bucks!" Click through for more images.

The View From Here: Another Country, Semley, England

Jill Singer — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:40:19 +0000

When Paul de Zwart founded Another Country a little over a year ago, the name wasn’t meant to be quite so literal: A small furniture company that focuses on affordably priced, well designed, but not overly trendy wood pieces, Another Country initially wore its Made in the UK status like a badge of honor, crafting small runs by hand using FSC-certified timber from a tiny workshop in the Dorset village of Semley, two hours east of London. De Zwart, who co-founded Wallpaper with Tyler Brûlé in the mid-‘90s, had originally devised the idea for Another Country after searching in vain for an affordable three-legged stool that might fit as well in the country home he was refurbishing as it would in his London flat. The proportions and rounded peg details of the stool De Zwart ended up designing in collaboration with Dominic Parish — a furniture-maker in Semley and now De Zwart’s business partner — eventually informed a 10-piece collection that debuted to fanfare and high praise during 2010’s London Design Festival. Fast-forward to now, and the brand is thriving, having just released a second, more angular furniture series and recently expanded into small goods like pottery, candlesticks, clocks, and desktop accessories. But ask De Zwart where the hub of Another Country’s production now sits, and the answer might surprise you.

Inspired By: Architecture

Monica Khemsurov — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:26:24 +0000

Does it seem strange to think of furniture, which has such an intimate relationship with the human body, as architecture in miniature? Not, at least, if you count the number of legendary architects who employed their craft in the making of chairs and tables — Eames, van der Rohe, Gray, Corbu, Saarinen, Sottsass — plus all the contemporary ones, like David Adjaye, who aspire to work fluidly across all scales. Way before there was design-art, there was no more permeable disciplinary boundary than the one between buildings and the objects that occupied them. Which, of course, has made the overlap a longtime topic of interest among Sight Unseen's editors. But what's really piqued our curiosity lately is how the relationship works in the other direction, when designers trained to make furniture and objects try to harness larger architectural ideas and shrink them down to a more familiar level — one on which they can be lived with, rather than in. Sometimes you end up with baby skyscrapers or re-appropriated I-beams, other times it's a single detail used to evoke a disproportionate sense of the monumental. We decided to put together a small roundup of recent furniture by designers who take inspiration from various aspects of a profession that Philip Johnson once called "the art of wasting space."

At Home With: Oscar Tuazon, artist, and Dorothée Perret, editor

Jill Singer — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:33:07 +0000

Like most good photographers, Daniel Trese is a chronic wanderer. Troll the internet for instances of his work for magazines like Pin-Up and Butt, and you’ll find visual essays — often accompanied by musings he wrote himself — that seem like off-the-cuff missives from the road. “Oh hi, I was just traveling from Paris to the Italian countryside and I managed to shoot these beautiful images for you,” is what a typical contribution from the Los Angeles–based photog seems to say. So we were pleased earlier this winter when Trese wrote to us with pictures he’d taken during a recent visit to the new Paris home of his friends, the art-world power couple Dorothée Perret — formerly of Purple and current editor of Paris, LA — and Oscar Tuazon, a onetime Seattleite who makes sculptural art in raw concrete and wood, and who’s about to become known as one of the stars of this year’s upcoming Whitney Biennial. The couple and their two girls had recently relocated after a fire burned down their Montmartre duplex, and Tuazon had built bits of the new house from pieces of the old. Trese, who was in Paris during Fashion Week shooting bloggers Tavi Gevinson and Diane Pernet for a Dutch magazine called Girls Like Us, shot both houses and sent us notes he'd jotted down from his day with the family.

Inventory: Sam Baron, designer and art director

Jill Singer — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:19:45 +0000

As a child growing up in the Jura mountains on a small farm on the border between France and Switzerland, the first thing designer Sam Baron remembers collecting were the stickers you scrape from the skins of fruits, heralding their arrival from someplace exotic — tomatoes from Mexico, say, or bananas from Guadeloupe. “For me, it was like a small souvenir from a trip I had never taken, an invitation to think about someplace else and another way of life,” Baron told me from his studio in Lisbon earlier this fall. Of course these days, the designer needn’t only imagine what life is like in faraway places: As head of the design department at Fabrica and a designer for outfits like Ligne Roset, Secondome Gallery, and Bosa Ceramics, Baron’s work has him constantly jetting from Paris to Milan to Treviso, where Fabrica is based; to Venice, where his glassworks are blown; and back to Lisbon, where he recently opened an office with Fabrica alums Gonçalo Campos and Catarina Carreiras, and where he lives with his wife.

Shop: New Necklaces by ROLU and Tanya Aguiñiga

Monica Khemsurov — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:20:01 +0000

Yesterday we introduced you to the up-and-coming Minneapolis-based design studio ROLU, whose plywood and OSB chairs inspired by conceptual art and modernist sculpture have garnered them the design-world equivalent of a cult following as of late. Today, we're excited to announce that the multi-talented trio have designed their very first jewelry project, exclusively for the Sight Unseen shop. Called Shapes After Guy (and Lost At Sea), the felt-backed plywood necklaces — which can be worn individually or in a group — make for some serious statement pieces, and yet they're only $100 each. We've also got a brand new handmade dyed-rope necklace design by the rising California talent Tanya Aguiñiga, which is even chunkier than our other Tanya creations and yet rings in at just $125.

Up and Coming: ROLU, Designers

Monica Khemsurov — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:05:24 +0000

Before Matt Olson and Mike Brady of the Minneapolis studio ROLU began making boxy plywood furniture in 2010 — earning them serious contemporary design cred and a reputation for channeling Donald Judd — they spent seven years designing landscapes, minimalist geometric compositions in steel, wood, concrete, and grass. It was those projects, says Olson, that have helped define the group’s work since, from their love for earthy materials to their awareness of design’s larger experiential qualities. “A landscape is a dynamic thing,” Olson explains. “It has smells, it grows and dies and changes. That taught me to pay attention to what’s really happening with an object; the chair as a visual and functional thing is only the start.” In ROLU’s case, chairs can also interact with users, reference sculptures and performance art and drawings, or become performances themselves, often by way of little more than a few planes of OSB.

Self Portrait: OS ∆ OOS, Syzygy Lamps

Monica Khemsurov — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:26:59 +0000

Credit where credit is due: The idea for Sight Unseen's newest column, Self Portrait, came from a chat we had recently with Pin-Up editor Felix Burrichter, over lunch in Soho. "Why don't you feature more products?" he asked us, to which we replied that our site is really about process — not products. Felix suggested we ask designers to pose with their latest works, something more personal than just reporting the news. The notion rattled around in our brains for a few months until it evolved into something even more exciting, at least we think so: A series inviting designers and artists to visually present their creations to us in a unique way, photographing them firsthand in a setting or setup that somehow illuminates the ideas behind the object. Our first submission comes from Oskar Peet, who with his partner Sophie Mensen founded the Eindhoven-based firm OS ∆ OOS this fall, launching with a trio of lamps so beautiful and intriguing that we actually feel grateful to Burrichter for inspiring the perfect platform with which to share them. Check out Peet and Mensen's submission above, then read below about how — and why — they got the shot.

The Making of: Skin Rugs by Agustina Woodgate, Artist

Ali Moran — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:28:46 +0000

Agustina Woodgate is one of those artists whose work is defined by its very resistance to definition: Wooden doormats, inspirational poems secretly sewn to thrift store tags, fairy tale–themed performance pieces — it can be hard to see the thread. That is, until you notice her obsession with bizarre materials. Woodgate once made a chandelier out of 36 yards of defective fishing line, while her Tower series comprises 4.5-foot turrets whose miniature bricks — nearly 3,000 of them — were woven from human hair she collected while offering random pedestrians free haircuts on the streets of Miami. And then there are her Skin Rugs, which she patches together from the hides of used stuffed animals, a kind of distant cousin to the Campana brothers’ Banquete chair. It’s hardly a surprise when Woodgate says she finds inspiration in everything: “I’m just a very curious person,” she says.