Sight Unseen

Eye Candy: Yanyan Huang, Artist

Kelly Rakowski — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:33:39 +0000

Yanyan Huang's brushstrokes are carefree, lively and effortlessly beautiful. Feather-like twists and turns, her paintings and sculptures take you on a free falling ride. Huang works in a span of creative mediums, paintings, drawings, ceramics, books and dresses. They all piece together to tell her stories. Huang spends her time between Florence, Italy and California.

Sighted: Paul Loebach Q+A on Core77

Monica Khemsurov — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:20:54 +0000

One of the things we love so much about the website Core77 is that it makes the very wide, sometimes dry world of industrial design feel like such a small, warm, tight-knit community; it's all that insider info, combined with a jovial, conversational tone and a knack for rounding up essays and other up-close-and-personal content from so many great design voices. We're all about the up-close-and-personal here at Sight Unseen, so we love it every time Core starts a new series devoted to things like entrepreneur profiles and Proust questionnaires; their newest column — called, simply, the Core77 Questionnaire — is only two subjects old, and we're already looking forward to finding out what the designers we admire love and hate about their job, how they procrastinate, and where they see themselves in 10 years. Last week's interview was with an old SU mainstay, the Brooklyn furniture and product designer Paul Loebach, whose responses we've excerpted here for your reading pleasure.

What We Saw: At DMY 2013

Monica Khemsurov — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:46:46 +0000

One half of Sight Unseen may currently be stationed in Berlin, but when it came to covering DMY last week — the 10-year-old fair for young designers that takes place here annually at the decommissioned Tempelhof airport — we passed the torch to our longtime friend and sometime SU contributor, Thorsten van Elten of the online shop Theo, while we jetted off to Basel. In Berlin from London for a few days on a whim, partly to check out the fair's offerings and partly as a tax-deductible excuse to revisit one of his favorite cities, van Elten documented for us his personal DMY selections, but also key moments from his romp through town — all couched in his crazy sense of humor. Scroll through his DMY travel diary below, then head over to Theo to check out what he does for a living.

What We Saw: At Design/Miami Basel and Art Basel 2013

Monica Khemsurov — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:22:33 +0000

This week, I got more than a few emails from friends and family members flummoxed by my trip to Art Basel. "You're where???" exclaimed my mother, halfway believing I'd temporarily left my annual summer sojourn in Berlin to double back to Miami for three days. That's because while Sight Unseen has been a longtime devotee of the Floridian version of the international design and art fair — stretching back to our I.D. magazine days — we've never managed to make it to the Swiss edition, which is even more extensive. Turns out 2013 was a pretty amazing year to call our first: Design Miami/Basel moved into the incredible new Herzog & de Meuron building, expanding its show in the process, and Art Basel totally killed it with the Untitled show of large-scale works, featuring a new piece by the wonder twins of contemporary installation art, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Artsy made my trip 10 times easier with its extensive online preview of both shows (not to mention an ingenious iPhone-charging station at its ROLU-designed fair booth), and Craig Robins put the cherry on top by letting Kanye West preview his new album — and perform a song a mere 8 feet in front of me — with less than 7 hours' notice. You totally should have been there, but if you weren't, here's the Sight Unseen rundown.

Eye Candy: Cody Hoyt, Artist

Kelly Rakowski — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:43:24 +0000

Cody Hoyt skillfully blends the natural hues of clay to create contemporary motifs, forming the earth material into angular shaped vessels. A perfect home for a succulent plant. Marbled, dotted, wave-y stripes flow over the vases sharp-cornered edges. Hoyt's ceramic beauties are made by hand in his Brooklyn studio.

The Making of: Rachel Hulin’s Flying Baby Series

Jill Singer — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:46:17 +0000

The photographs in Rachel Hulin’s Flying Series, in which her baby Henry appears to float in the landscape, have a dreamy, almost magical quality to them, but they started in the most pedestrian of ways: Hulin was kind of bored. A new mom who’d recently relocated from Brooklyn to Providence, Rhode Island, she says, “I was looking for a project to sink my teeth into while I was home with Henry when he was so little. I was trying figure out motherhood and the whole thing seemed so weird to me.” A former blogger and photo editor who’d spent the better part of nine years constantly looking at pictures, she was aware of a genre of photos called “floaters” and was interested in the figure in landscape as well — “finding a beautiful scene and somehow making it more personal by putting someone you love in it,” she says. She never expected to do a floating series of her own, but once she did one photo, she was kind of hooked. “Partly it was being in a new city, trying to find special places with a baby,” she says. “It was a nice thing to do together. It became what we did in the afternoons.”

Excerpt: Exhibition: New Abstract at The Printhouse Gallery

Jill Singer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:31:39 +0000

Is it possible, in this day and age, to have a new movement in design, à la Art Deco, or Memphis? That was the question we posed to our panel of emerging designers a few weeks ago at the Collective Design Fair here in New York City, and the consensus appeared to be no. (As one participant claimed, "Everything just looks like the internet now.") But this week, a new group show opened in London, curated by Printhouse Gallery's Ruth Hanahoe and illustrator Saskia Pomeroy, that claimed one such new movement. They call it the New Abstract, and they've brought together different media in the visual arts — primarily prints, paintings, and ceramics — all united by a certain aesthetic and informed in some way by the process of making. (To be fair, a lot of the work does look like the internet; perhaps Tumblr is this generation's aesthetic movement.) We're still on the fence about whether the name will stick, but the curators do make an excellent case for the commonalities that tie the work together.

Eye Candy: Lotta Lampa, Product Designer

Kelly Rakowski — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:25:58 +0000

Lotta Lampa's designs ooze a kind of nightclub chic. There's an edge to them, a razzle-dazzle, club kid cool. Yet there are more to her pieces than just making the scene. Her most recent work, Raaisii Collection, references the stereotypes of people from Northern Sweden (where Lampa was raised). "I have found symbols representing some of the prejudices, and then used them to create three dimensional objects in the form of furniture and vases." Lampa lives in Stockholm and Kalix, Sweden.