Hasta La Ideas

Behind the scenes with the NYC-based footwear brand’s founder and designer Ce Ce Chin

Proving that fashion and function can indeed go hand in hand, 80%20 stands out as a chic, everyday answer to the often painful women’s heel. What started as a girl’s spin on what sneaker-heads and skaters were wearing has grown into a much more mature and fashion-focused footwear line for ladies. While the Vans-inspired styles have evolved into a more formal silhouette, the emphasis on comfort and wearability has remained a constant. To get a better feel for this continuous progression we recently caught up with founder and creative director Ce Ce Chin at her studio.

Looking out onto midtown Manhattan, Chin’s Fashion District design studio maintains a sense of order, with only a few inspiration boards hinting to the free-flowing creativity at the heart of the operation. Neatly tucked away behind closet doors is an endless collection of sample shoes, swatches and objects—offering somewhat of a parallel to the designer’s signature style, the Original Hidden Wedge.

Chin describes her design process as “non-linear”, mocking up ideas, sketches and digital models as she goes, and using her unique masking tape technique. Covering current shoe styles in tape allows the designer to create a 3D drawing board of sorts, turning her ideas into a model she can hold in her hands before resorting to an actual prototype. The freedom of adjustment during the design process allows Chin and her team to toy with ideas and colorways, keeping 80%20’s playful attitude going from ideation to production.

As shown in her design methods, Chin says she has always learned better through experience than by regimented task-driven assignments, a style that ultimately led the designer from her hometown in the Midwest to experiment with design in NYC, where her grandfather and father had grown up. Fifteen years later, Chin—who lives in her grandfather’s third-generation Chinatown apartment—has made a name for herself among what she calls the male “shoe dogs”.

Chin sees a future of exploration and expansion for 80%20, aiming to introduce more silhouettes and materials for upcoming collections, like Hudson Bay-inspired colorways and cork-molded footbeds on a high-heeled platform for Fall 2012. As far as inspiration goes, Chin says she prefers to “build based on what works, but shaped on the current vernacular.” With this in mind, the line seems poised to continue introducing innovative new styles that still follow the 80%20 mantra of designing for everyday use.

For a closer look at the 80%20 design studio check the gallery below.

Paul Darragh’s design studio launches in NYC with a gallery show dedicated to the East Village

Bemodern, otherwise known as Paul Darragh, grew up in a tiny farming community in New Zealand before moving to Melbourne, Australia, where he lived for the next four years. It was there that he first caught our attention and, not long after that, decided to chase his dreams to New York City to open Manhattan Born. If the name of his new design agency is anything to go by, it would appear this most recent home has had a great impact on Darragh.

“Manhattan Born is a creative place—a studio, agency and production facility,” says Darragh of the agency he started with Casey Steele. “I’d like to think we do it all. Design is such a crossover between mediums now. I feel like if it is something that can be designed, we’ll do it. So far our work has been in print, television, video, branding and interactive. We just launched a collection of T-shirts and an art show with paintings, screen prints, collage and animation.” Across their various branding projects the unique pace and energy of NYC seems to guide the fusion of sharp design and technology that characterizes their work.

The show Darragh mentions christened their brand-new Manhattan Born studio and storefront in the East Village. “We want to be more of a brand than just a studio that caters to people’s brands,” says Darragh. “We want to be a tangible part of your life, rather than just some videos online. The intention of the new shop space is to have a presence as a community creative spot. We are accessible, so people can see what we’re doing, walk past and see the art through the window. The other part of the new space is a gallery. We will have monthly shows. It’s a platform for artists and designers to show their work in a new context.”

Settling in to their new neighborhood, Darragh and Steele chose to launch with a show entitled “East Village, I Heart You”. “I’ve always loved living in the East Village and I’m definitely inspired by it,” says Darragh. “So, now we moved the studio here I wanted the first show to be in part an homage to the neighborhood—almost like ‘Thanks for having us’ and in another way, to set the tone for who we are as a studio, as a brand and as a physical space. The show speaks to the texture of the East Village. In part it’s dilapidated, cracked and dirty. It has patina, it has attitude, and it’s always colorful and exciting.”

“We’re not Chelsea fine art or SoHo pop art. We’re a sub-cultural showcase, still featuring quality, individual and unique art in all different mediums,” says Darragh. “The space is also going to grow by itself. I think the building has control over its own destiny, and it will become something I probably haven’t thought of yet—that’s the most exciting part!”

Manhattan Born

336 E 5th St.

New York, NY, 10003

The LA-based photographer talks about her latest show, “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love”

Sometimes life, as with art, takes an unforeseen turn down a path we would have never intentionally traveled, forcing us to see things differently. LA-based photographer Melanie Willhide seems to have experienced the phenomenon more often than one may like, but rather than be derailed, Willhide has been inspired. When a fire destroyed many of her belongings some years ago, she created the intensely fragile “Sleeping Beauties” series. Now, her latest body of work is named for the perpetrator that robbed her home. “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” is now showing at NYC’s Von Lintel Gallery and, after viewing the exhibition we felt compelled to learn more about the artist’s serendipitous inspiration.

As it happened, Willhide’s laptop was stolen by a burglar, but then recovered by the police. She struggled to retrieve the wiped contents—two bodies of work, family pictures and her own wedding album—but what files she could save were corrupted. Rather than lament the loss, the artist was intrigued by the fragmented photographs and learned how to replicate the “language” used to distort them. As a result, she was able to generate more using vintage photographs and other sourced material she’d collected for visual reference. She created complementary images, bringing about what Willhide calls a “mish-mashed body of work” that she feels represents what had been stolen from the machine, and even more so, the life affected by the incident.

The bizarre duplicities and mind-bending effects achieved in “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” mark a stylistic departure from Willhide’s earlier work, introducing a theme that is likely to continue. “Utilizing the language of the corrupted files has a lot of potential,” says Willhide. “There’s something really powerful about seeing the delicacy of the digital file.”

By revealing how she creates the optical illusion in her photographs, Willhide champions the art form of digital photography as it embraces programs like Photoshop in a non-traditional sense. “It requires me to think of Photoshop in terms of how it shouldn’t be used,” says Willhide. Shifting concern from the authenticity of an image’s subject to the image as a whole, she feels, gives photographers an “opportunity to come out against the real”—a sentiment suggesting parallels to surrealist movements across other mediums.

Melanie Willhide‘s conceptually driven “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” will be on show at NYC’s Von Lintel Gallery through 24 March, 2012.

Chandelier Creative farms branded honey at their Montauk surf retreat

Ideas tend to be fleeting but, as the only food source with no known shelf life, honey quite literally lasts a lifetime. Aiming to combine the two and, in doing so, live up to its name, NYC-based agency Chandelier Creative set up a Montauk retreat to farm fresh honey, and give employees a place to go for rest, relaxation and inspiration. Presenting a new kind of bohemian enclave, Chandelier’s beautifully appointed, multipurpose Surf Shack fosters morale from within, while productively churning out an actual product for a whole new way of marketing itself.

As the son of Australian honey farmers, Chandelier founder Richard Christiansen outfitted his digs with the proper authority, hand-selecting a range of coastal flowers native to Montauk to ensure his bees would produce a special kind of honey. For the Surf Shack he chose an array of black-eyed Susans, honeysuckle and echinacea and, much like he did with the Shack’s carefully decorated interior, Christiansen built and painted a custom hive to befit the Chandelier bees. “Making honey is a true labor of love” he explains. “My family has always said that happy bees make sexy honey. And the same is true for creatives.”

With a keen eye and trained tongue, Christiansen describes the honey as slightly lighter in color than most, due to the native Montauk nectar, with a taste that’s “very soft and gentle,” but “a little salty, too.” Packaged by members of the Chandelier Creative team, the honey is gifted to every weekend visitor, be it boyfriend, girlfriend, client or friend as a sweet reminder to keep creating with the dedication and vigor of a honey bee.

Throughout the 2011 summer the unique blend of flora led the Chandelier bees to produce an end-of-season surplus of 300 jars, of which some 75 are still available. The remaining jars can be purchased exclusively through the Chandelier Creative online shop, along with a rotation of “special collaborations with our favorite people.” Chandelier Creative aims to re-open the Surf Shack in May with the addition of chickens and vegetables, likely to help continue the expansion of the Chandelier brand from the ground up.

The process behind the artist’s large-scale portraits pairing cultural icons

Already a household name in Asia, Korean painter Kim Dong Yoo‘s inaugural U.S. exhibit at NYC’s Hasted Kraeutler gallery aims to introduce the artist to a new, American audience. The self-titled show features a series of large-scale paintings that, from afar, depict a single grand portrait of notables from John F. Kennedy to Michael Jackson. Upon closer inspection, however, one realizes that the work is actually comprised of hundreds of smaller portraits of other, connected figures from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna.

The relationships between his culturally iconic pairings are intriguing. In addition to Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana, and Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck; Kim Dong Yoo has coupled Albert Einstein, one of the greatest geniuses of all time, with Marilyn Monroe, one of the greatest beauties of all time. He’s also played upon the religious and pop culture interpretations of the Madonna, and the tension inherent in the legendary relationships between Jacqueline Kennedy and JFK, and JFK and Monroe, to name a few.

Perhaps even more surprising than the dueling portraits, however, is the process behind each piece. While the look is decidedly digital, the work itself is absolutely man-made. Kim Dong Yoo begins each labor-intensive piece by drawing a grid, hanging a tiny photo for reference by his canvas. He then hand paints every tiny portrait—no stencils, stamps or computers involved. It takes him about two days to complete a single half row, wherein each portrait varies just so from the rest, allowing for the larger, composite portrait’s depiction. Kim Dong Yoo began the series in the late nineties, and completes three to five paintings each year. As gallery partner Sarah Hasted notes, “He makes it look easy, but the process is incredibly involved.”

Elements of Kim Dong Yoo’s series call to mind the work of both Andy Warhol and Chuck Close. Also interesting, according to the gallery, is the fact that another artist by the name of Alex Goufeng Cao has recently begun displaying work using the same visual concept, though his pieces are rendered digitally. Hasted Kraeutler notes the similarities bring up questions of derivation and new creation—ongoing issues in the modern art world—but rather than taking legal action, Joseph Kraeutler says, “We just want people to understand the concept began as Kim Dong Yoo’s.”

When Kim Dong Yoo himself is asked what he hopes people will take away from the show, the artist responds: “I find joy in the fact that my work balances both grid-like elements, which call to mind the digital world, and an analogical technique—drawing every pixel by hand. And while these components coexist in my work, I want viewers to also see both the visual and emotional harmony and the competition between the two figures—Marilyn and JFK, for example—in every piece. But, at the same time, the thoughts the viewers have when they see the works will be colored by their own distinctive feelings regarding the format and the personalities involved.”

Kim Dong Yoo is on display at New York’s Hasted Kraeutler through 24 March 2012.