Sight Unseen install at Phillips Los Angeles.
Phillips and Sight Unseen are proud to announce an exciting partnership centered around our recently launched outpost in Los Angeles. Through the collaboration, Sight Unseen will curate a rotating selection of contemporary design pieces for the West Hollywood gallery space, to be exhibited alongside Phillips' consigments of 20th Century and Contemporary art, Design, Jewelry, and Watches. Beginning October 24th, the works of ten designers — all from Southern California — will be on view in at 9041 Nemo Street, all of which will be available for purchase through Sight Unseen. Below, the designers share insight on the works and creative processes that inspire them.
Atelier de Troupe
Atelier de Troupe is a design studio based in Los Angeles. Founded in 2011 by French former production designer Gabriel Abraham, Atelier de Troupe takes a narrative approach to its collections, softening the ascetic grammar of the Bauhaus with layered references to vintage Italian and French design. The brand’s furniture and lighting is comfortably minimalist, synthesizing disparate influences into one cohesive vision for modern life. Every A de T piece is hand manufactured by local fabricators, minimizing waste and allowing for responsible sourcing and extensive customization. The Tempo series is composed of curves and lines creating rhythm and repetition. The Tempo floor lamp on view is available in matte black or satin brass with an opal sandblasted glass bulb cover.
BZIPPY
BZIPPY. Photo: Laure Joliet.
BZIPPY is a ceramic furniture and housewares company producing open edition wares. Inspired by architecture and industrial design, BZIPPY builds on a taxonomy of slab-based forms to deliver high-quality, hand-built functional ceramic objects. The BZIPPY collection of side tables and planters comprises three core designs: the Hex, the Cloud, and the Castle. As an homage to the indoor/outdoor southern California lifestyle, side tables and planters can be used both indoors and outdoors without worry that weather will have an adverse effect. The open edition is available in standardized sizes that are backwards engineered for efficient hand production with rolled slabs and extruded tubes, allowing the studio to create a consistent product while maintaining a hand-built quality. BZIPPY side tables and planters are made to order and are currently available in nearly 50 glazes. The Castle series playfully combines the Hex and the Cloud shapes into a form that resembles the architecture of a castle.
Casey McCafferty
Casey McCafferty exercises a respect for material and traditional technique in each piece he creates. Working with raw materials, applying both Old World craft and unorthodox experimentation, Casey seeks the intersections where tactility, substance, and heft meet concept and metaphor. Mythology, history, and nature play a huge part in his inspiration. The Pericles chair is sculpted from ash grown in Pennsylvania and carved by Casey with hand tools. There are no templates or computers used in this process, so each piece has its own unique characteristics. The whole process brings alive a new narrative and viewpoint on stories and written history.
Christopher Norman
Christopher Norman is a Los Angeles-based artist creating formal objects for living. In addition to being trained as an architect, Christopher has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where he investigated ancient homes. Looking to domestic objects of antiquity as well as contemporary industrial and mass-produced elements, Norman seeks out the commonalities in design history, leveraging universal shapes to render objects at once surprising and familiar. This side table is carved from walnut finished with linseed oil to a dimension of 16 x 19 inches. The piece is created from a veneer grade, Mexican-era, 200+ year-old walnut tree from Northern California.
Laun
Laun is a collaborative design firm marrying glamour and delight with the built world. In 2018, friends Rachel Bullock and Molly Purnell brought together their backgrounds in woodworking, metal working and architecture to build a practice of enduring spaces and products. Laun’s object line harnesses the unique talents of Los Angeles-based manufacturers to craft timeless, heirloom quality furniture suitable for both indoor and outdoor use. Laun Studio is the architecture and interiors branch of Laun where curiosity and exploration are the founding design tenets. Simultaneously delicate and bold, the Ribbon series is a playful addition to the Laun catalog. The layered aluminum tubes stack together to form a solid array and allow for custom widths in an infinite combination of forms.
Michael Felix
A 3rd generation upholstery designer, Michael Felix began his design career as a sample-maker’s assistant in the furniture factory founded in 1959 by his grandfather. His training in classic upholstery techniques makes for a collection that is thoughtfully designed, structurally engineered and made for a lifetime of use. Each piece of furniture is made to order by hand in California, allowing for a maximum amount of customization of fabrics and finishes. Michael also designs custom furniture solutions for commercial and residential projects. The Gaspar table is 2 pieces of granite shaped to join each other, creating a surface for a sofa or chair side table, while his Madda sofa is a contemporary interpretation of the classic club sofa.
Nicholas Pourfard
Nicholas Bijan Pourfard is a furniture and lighting designer based in San Diego. Most of his work is focused on movement and material exploration. The Box chair is a minimal chair which emphasizes linear simplicity and an “airy” quality that allows the sitter to see through the chair as much as possible. With a swiveling backrest and oversized plank seat, it leaves no compromise for comfortability and functionality. Built using solid wood with equal dimension in all axes creating a sort of cube that pays homage to the Wassily chair and Bauhaus emotions.
Objects for Objects
Objects for Objects. Photo: Seth Caplan.
Objects for Objects is a Los Angeles–based furniture brand founded in 2017 by Leonard Bessemer. As a self-taught carpenter, Bessemer got his start doing fabrication for artists in Berlin. Upon his return to California, he began doing full commercial and residential build-outs. Using leftover materials from those jobs, he built the designs that would become his own furniture brand: Objects for Objects. The furniture is odd and playful, yet elegant. All pieces are built by hand, one at a time, in the studio or in collaboration with local craftsmen. One of Objects for Objects signature pieces, the Wave bench, is now available upholstered in Raf Simons Phlox Corduroy Fabric by Kvadrat. Sculptural, yet comfortable, the Wave bench plays with ideas on how we interact with our furniture and how our furniture interacts with our spaces. The Wave bench is made in Los Angeles and the fabric is customizable.
Ryan Belli
Ryan Belli is a Los Angeles–based designer who constructs all of his pieces in the studio by hand. He attended Vassar College before transferring out west to pursue design at Art Center in Pasadena. A meeting with The Haas Brothers started him working closely with founders Niki and Simon, where he honed his skills across a diverse range of mediums. After seven years with the Haas studio, he created BELLI. Drawing inspiration from natural and industrial forms, he innovates by pushing material intersections in unexpected ways. Inspired by natural rock formations in Bryce Canyon, this series explores the relationship of soft and hard elements. These pieces are a pleasant combination of form and function — unique designs paired with comfort.
soft-geometry
soft-geometry. Photo: Alanna Hale.
Founded in 2019 by Indian designers Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, soft-geometry is a collaborative design studio creating collectible objects around a central theme of softness. Their work intersects texture, transparency, and color, with slow hand-worked techniques, imperfection and intricate craft. Zacharias and Chaudhary often reference these ideas from the rich visual culture and hand-crafts of their home towns in India, and derive opportunities to bridge traditional and modern ways of making and seeing. They currently live and work between San Francisco, USA and Kochi, India.
Elio lamps are stacks of translucent, tubular, cast resin that mimic interactions of natural light on uneven transparencies. Inspired by an informal photo series documenting the play of light on glass, water, skin and dust, the lamps look to recreate a diffused glow through textured resin, using frosted sugar jellies as a visual reference. The lamp’s tubular stack can be customized to different heights, and its singular bend is a small ode to Eileen Gray’s Bibendum lounge. Integrated with smart wifi devices, Elio can be easily controlled by voice commands, via a digital switch on your phone, or its regular physical switch. Controls can be set up via the Smart Life phone app to be compatible with Siri, Alexa, and other smart devices.
Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, founders of Sight Unseen.
Sight Unseen is an online magazine that uncovers what’s new and next in design and the visual arts, with a focus on independent makers working outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. Since its founding in 2009, the site has served as a destination for companies and individuals interested in scouting new talent as well as an inspiration for those working in creative pursuits. Sight Unseen also curates exhibitions and pop-up shops, produces events, and provides editorial and consulting services for a variety of forward-thinking clients.
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