Pale Blue Magazine

Tangent returns for a 2nd edition in collaboration with @palebluemag A group exhibition of furniture, design, and objects featuring work by NYC-based artists: Joey Aji @j__aji Hanna Anonen @hannaanonen Hannah Bigeleisen @h.bigeleisen Joël Brodovsky-Adams @jbaceramics Steven Bukowski @stevenbukowski Michael Daae @studiodaae Hea ko @heakostudio Yuxuan Huang @yuxuan_huang__ Theophane Ingold @theophaneingold Jaye Kim @jaye_kim_ Eric Nakassa @ericnakassa Sophie Parker @wifenyc Micah Rosenblatt @the_micah Benjamin Schleif @schleifstudio Anthony Zollo @studiozollo 📍 @infinitemachine 🗓️ Opening May 9, 6–10 PM On view during @nycxdesign (May 10, 12-14) 🪩 Music by @bushwickdp 🍞 Focaccia sold by @eatgotcha Special thank you to our beverage sponsors: @officialbelaire @condesagin @theowlsbrew @drinksunboy Flyer by @ericnakassa RSVP at tangent.nyc (link in bio)

We’re looking for designers pushing boundaries with innovative materials, reimagined craft, or pieces that tell compelling stories. What drives your practice? What inspires your latest work? These open calls have become one of our favorite parts of running the magazine. We’re constantly discovering new voices and perspectives that shape how we understand contemporary design and craft culture. It’s how we find the makers and innovators who deserve attention. Send us images and the journey behind them via DM or email at [email protected]. We’ll feature selected work in our ongoing spotlight series. Tag designers whose work deserves to be seen!

Sound is having a moment. Listening bars are popping up every week, live music attendance is at record highs, and speakers are showing up at design fairs alongside furniture. The question is: who’s actually building the systems behind all this sonic obsession? We tracked down 5 independent speaker designers creating some of the city’s best sound. Their work spans sculptural experiments to dub-inspired monsters, each reflecting personal philosophies about how sound should feel, look, and move through space. Meet House Under Magic, Joel Seigle, WAF Audio, Western Acoustics, and Bridge Street Sound. Full interviews with each designer drop daily this week, featuring conversations between the makers themselves. Article intro by Juliyen Davis (@juliyennnnnnnnnnnn ). Read the full story through our link in bio! 🔊 @houseundermagic @joelseigle @waf_audio @westernacoustics @bridgestreetsound

Opening night for Tangent (@tangent.nyc ) was incredible! Thank you to everyone who came through and supported. We saw so many familiar faces and met plenty of new ones, so we wanted to hear what people actually thought. We asked a few non-design people what their favorite piece from the show was. Watch to see what they picked! Works mentioned: Judee Mirror by @ericnakassa Euclid Mirror by @stevenbukowski Arcora Lamp by @heakostudio Paraiso Mirror by @studiodaae Bud Vase by @jbaceramics Pinch Table by @joey_aji Special thanks to @janenho and @studiodaae for hosting an incredible show! Tangent is still on view through May 14 at @infinitemachine during @nycxdesign .

Elsewhere, Still Ours is one of the shows we’re most excited about for NYC Design Week. Presented by PARKIM (@parkim.picks ) in collaboration with Club COLLECTIBLE at The Standard, East Village (@thestandardeastvillage ), the exhibition features nine Korean and Korean diaspora artists and designers. Korean representation in art and design is important to us, and we’re excited to see it highlighted during Design Week in New York. This show brings together artists and designers exploring contemporary interpretations of identity through material. The work spans ceramics, textile, stone, metal, and resin, using traditional materials like hanji, hemp, and silk alongside acrylic and aluminum. We’re also moderating a panel on May 11th with Dahae Song, Liv Vaisberg, and Sandy Park, DM us for details! Artists & Designers: @cheongsil_lee @seohstudio @fictstudio @yoon_potter @songdahae @keemhoney @yoona.hur @junsumartino @hakmazing The Standard, East Village 25 Cooper Square, New York May 10–14, 2026 10AM – 5PM (May 10 by appointment only) Come by if you’re around!

Follow along as Kristin Coleman of Available Items (@available_items ) gives us a tour of Sense of Place, a group exhibition featuring some of the best art and design the Hudson Valley has to offer. The show is installed throughout Ohayo Mountain House, a newly built modern home in the Catskill Mountains designed by Amin Tadj Studio. One of our favorite exhibitions this year, as expected from Available Items. The house itself is stunning, and seeing furniture, lighting, ceramics, and sculpture installed in an actual mountain home rather than a gallery changes how you experience each piece. You’ll see work from Jackrabbit Studio, Jesse Groom, Aaron Getman-Pickering, Katie Stout, Office of Tangible Space, Kieran Kinsella, Loose Parts, and about fifteen other studios whose work we love. Sense of Place runs through May 31st, open Saturdays 11am to 5pm and by appointment at 760 Ohayo Mountain Road in Glenford. It’s worth the trip. Featuring work by: Aaron Getman-Pickering (@aarongetmanpickering ) Amin Tadj (@amintadj ) Bob Bechtol (@bobbechtol.art ) Flowerpsycho (@flowerpsychos ) FN Furniture (@fnfurn ) Francesca DiMattio (@francescadimattio ) Jackrabbit Studio (@jackrabbitstudio ) Jake Coan (@jakecoan ) Jesse Groom (@_jessegroom_ ) Joshua Vogel (@joshua_vogel_sculpture ) Kat Howard (@kat_howard ) Katie Stout (@ummmsmile ) Kieran Kinsella (@kierankinsella ) LikeMindedObjects (@likemindedobjects ) Loose Parts (@loose_parts ) Michael McGrath (@m.r.mcgrath ) Mr. Liz Hopkins (@mr.lizhopkins ) Office of Tangible Space (@tangible.space ) Ori Carlin (@oricarlin ) Swell Studio (@swellstudio_ ) Tristan Fitch (@tristan_fitch )

Liz Oliver (@lizoliverstudio ) creates sculptural lighting from pleated cotton canvas using the Japanese resist-dyeing technique of Shibori, and we’re captivated by how she’s reimagined the tradition into these sweeping, feminine forms. The California-based artist wraps fabric around a tube, binds it tightly with string, and compresses it along a pole. Each pleat is shaped by the hand in that moment, wrapping string over and under to create undulations that mimic patterns found in nature. Nothing can be replicated. Her Aurora chandeliers are stunning—built on infrastructure designed like a hoop skirt, a nod to her costume design background that runs through everything she makes. She spent over a decade working as a costume textile artist for film and television, dyeing and distressing for productions. She taught herself Shibori obsessively in her free time until she realized these pleated pieces could become sculptures. That knowledge of texture and drapery is obvious in how the fabric moves, how light filters through the pleats, how each piece feels both delicate and architectural. The Alexandra V Collection draws from Hellenistic sculpture and architecture. The series was sparked by the Nike of Samothrace sculpture, with its dynamic stance, wings suggesting transcendence, and draped fabric resembling water. Liz abstracts those motifs into three-dimensional forms, exploring feminine strength through wings, water, and shells. There’s an elegance to how she translates those classical references into pleated textile. She’s breaking from traditional Shibori by focusing less on recognizable patterns and more on intentional abstraction. She creates white space, works with unconventional fabrics and colors, and turns the pleats into lighting and sculpture rather than garments or tapestries. The work feels floral and organic, each chandelier almost like a bloom suspended in space. 📸: @jillianpalucis , Liz Oliver

As newly minted car people, Car Part Time (@carparttime ) is one of the most exciting spaces in Brooklyn right now. The design was done by Office of Tangible Space (@tangible.space ), the bicoastal studio we’ve covered before for their community-focused design practice. That approach is obvious here too: they brought together vintage finds, independent designers, and custom built pieces to transform a 2,000-square-foot concrete warehouse into a social environment. The space also features rotating design and art from independent makers, currently showing work by sculptor Matt Byrd (@byrd.stone ). The incredible sound setup was done by House Under Magic (@houseundermagic ), another studio we’ve featured and love, with custom speakers inspired by car grills alongside the large yellow speakers pictured here. Freakout Spot (@freakout.spot ) curates the record collection, with vinyl available to browse, listen to, and purchase on site. Beyond the design, the programming is what really makes the space special. They host coffee and cars meetups, Formula 1 race viewings, automotive film screenings and listening sessions, young owner showcases, and more. They’re also launching Field Study Coffee (@fieldstudybk ), a multi-roaster coffee experience from the teams behind Three Legged Cat and Obscure Coffee, opening this Saturday 4/25. We wanted to break down what’s inside a space like this, so we’re showing you all the objects, furniture, and details that make this car club special.

Yelyzaveta Rudenok (@doinshapes ) created the Tetra Series by transforming used Tetra Pak cartons into furniture. The Vienna-based designer pairs hand-carved European walnut with woven strips of composite packaging, creating chairs and tabourets that question what we consider valuable or worth preserving. Walnut is treated with care, an objectively valuable natural resource. Tetra Pak also comes from wood pulp, but is widely seen as cheap and disposable. Bringing these materials together starts to unsettle that hierarchy, reflecting on consumption and mass production without being overly didactic. There’s a personal layer running through it too. Yelyzaveta grew up in a context where resourcefulness was part of everyday life. Her grandmother would never throw away milk or kefir packaging, washing and drying it, sometimes turning it into small functional objects. She remembers rows of freshly cleaned cartons hanging under the kitchen ceiling to dry. She collected many of the materials herself, going into cafés or pulling from public waste bins. The cartons are cleaned, cut, and reworked into sheets, then woven and sometimes reinforced with fabric to push their structural limits. The woven surfaces carry traces of their past life, printed patterns shifting across the walnut frames. What reads as something metallic at first is actually repurposed packaging. Each piece is handcrafted, currently existing as unique works with the potential to expand into small editions. Yelyzaveta works across sculpture, installation, and performance, approaching making as a bodily process. For her, manual labor becomes a way to stay present, objects shaped through the body and eventually returning to it through use. 📸: Lea Sonderegger, Adrien Maurice

One of the studios that’s stuck with us the most over the past few years is @bluegreenworks . There’s a clarity to what @peterbstaples is building that’s hard to fake. It feels shaped by years of experience and taste, but also carries the vitality of a designer finally building something under his own name, pushing ideas forward in real time. That mix shows up across the studio’s DNA, in earlier collections that pull from skateboarding, film, modernism, and tattoos, and in how he’s been thinking about Blue Green Works as more than just another design practice. That way of thinking expands with Garden, their latest collection, released April 1. It’s the studio’s first body of work that leans directly into something personal, developed after the passing of Staples’s mother. He wanted to create something heartbreaking, and the clear glass pieces hover between presence and absence, their luminous glow suggesting apparition and ascent. Garden reimagines Baroque ornamentation through sustained collaboration with Murano glass artisans. Rather than leaning on glassblowing for pure expression, Staples worked within the lineage’s feather and leaf iconography, stripping it back to focus on structure and light. As an American designer working within a centuries-old Italian tradition, he engages the history without getting stuck in it. The collaboration unfolded in a way that feels true to the work. Murano glassblowing is built on repetition, control, and deep technical knowledge. To get the leaves and feathers to feel like they’re drifting, Staples and the artisans developed what he calls “a calibrated system of difference” — slight shifts in scale, length, and orientation. Traditional Murano fixtures often hide their construction beneath layers of glass. Here, Staples leaves more of it exposed. You see how things connect, how the parts come together, which gives the pieces a kind of directness that runs through all of Blue Green Works. It’s an exciting moment for the studio, and for us to watch where it goes next. Every collection is a big step, getting closer to the full picture of what Blue Green Works can become. Stylist: @studioelenamora__ 📸: @paola_pansini

@joey_aji is a Brooklyn-based designer working between sculpture and furniture, building pieces that start with architectural fragments and end somewhere much less fixed. Domes, columns, carved ornament, references that feel old and familiar, but the way he handles them pushes them somewhere different. A lot of the work begins digitally. He models forms pulled from Gothic corbels or classical domes, then starts adjusting them, stretching, compressing, sharpening, until they feel slightly off. From there, they’re 3D printed and brought back into the studio, where the real shift happens. Each piece gets coated and hand-finished with cement, marble dust, and resin until the surface loses that printed feel and starts reading as something solid, closer to stone than plastic. That transformation is wild to see in person. What’s interesting is how the references don’t sit cleanly in one period. You’ll catch hints of Baroque curves, liturgical forms, even something almost prehistoric or biomorphic, but nothing lands literally. It’s more like everything is layered together and flattened into the same moment. Familiar, but hard to pin down. Maybe it’s a symptom of being online too long, Joey says, having access to ornament and architecture from every period at once. That access collapses time. There’s a personal layer running through it too. Growing up Syrian American around Orthodox and Mediterranean architecture, those forms carry weight, even as they’re translated through digital tools and reshaped in the studio. It’s less about preserving them and more about figuring out what happens to those references once they’re pushed through a completely different process. There’s something sacrilegious about scanning and distorting forms that feel sacred, but it mirrors how things exist online: compressed, circulated, re-saved. One of those practices that feels almost fully formed right out of the gate. Clear point of view, strong material language, working somewhere between digital and hand. We’re excited to see how this develops.

@nicolettedewaart ’s Berry Lamp starts with a familiar reference, the traditional Japanese chochin lantern, but quickly moves into something more sculptural and instinct-driven. Working entirely by hand, she builds each piece from natural, lightweight materials, creating a form that looks dense and heavy but feels surprisingly light when you pick it up. The lamp is shaped through an intuitive process. De Waart forms and layers irregular, paper-like spheres onto a frame, letting each one find its place rather than following a fixed pattern. No two elements are the same, and the final composition only reveals itself once the layering is complete. That unpredictability is part of the point, closer to how growth happens in nature than to any imposed geometry. The surface draws loosely from the structure of a blackberry. From a distance it reads as ordered, almost symmetrical, but up close the irregularities take over. Each lamp leans into that tension, embracing asymmetry rather than correcting it. For de Waart, perfection comes from variation, not uniformity, and every piece ends up one of a kind. Material plays a big role in that balance between appearance and reality. What reads as solid is built from lightweight components, including a translucent textile stretched and treated over the frame to hold its shape. The outer layer adds durability while softening the form, catching and diffusing light across the clustered surface. When lit, the lamp shifts. Light filters through the layered exterior and escapes from below, casting a soft, uneven glow that brings out depth and texture. There’s a sense of the object hovering, lightly anchored by its base but visually lifted. Unlit, it reads more like sculpture than lighting. Across her work, de Waart returns to ideas of connection, femininity, and material sensitivity, often drawing from natural forms and traditional techniques. The Berry Lamp sits somewhere between lighting and sculpture, held together by an intuitive process that values irregularity, touch, and making by hand.