Favorites | Site Unseen Offsite
This year's Site Unseen Offsite was a slightly smaller production than last years. In having less designer participants, those that were there had larger spaces and collectively cultivated a more focused point of view. Our favorite booths came from a both repeat exhibitors and first-timers.
Bari Ziperstein aka BZippy had an impressive presentation of her geometric, colorfully glazed ceramic pieces. Some of these objects have grown to a scale that brings them into the realm of furniture (she has in fact turned a number of them into side tables) and someone needs to give this woman a public commission because we're dying to see these forms as monumental public sculpture!
Elyse Graham was a favorite from last year and her extraordinary series of resin vessels. Each form is made of of hand-poured, colored resins that are ultimately sanded down, revealing a wonderful strata of resin layers that somehow simultaneously capture a lived past and a contemporary immediacy. Graham has a terrific process video where she creates one of her spherical vases over on her website.
Pieces is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based creative agency An Aesthetic Pursuit and to be honest I felt a little guilty loving it so much - there was "millennial pink" for days, glossy powder-coated geometric side tables and most perfect gridded tufted rugs you'll see. Then I decided to stop feeling guilty about how easy I was to please and just ran with it and I think I'm in love.
Norway x New York is the result of a cross-cultural exchange set up by Sight Unseen’s editors. It pairs "five entrepreneurial American studios with five up-and-coming Norwegian studios, who together spent six months working long-distance on objects that utilize an American workshop for fabrication and that can be independently manufactured." The outcome was a beautiful collection of glassware, furniture, table-top items and lighting all set off by sculptural plantlife casting theatrical shadows on the loveliest teal walls you can picture.
