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Sight Unseen

Impeccably curated by former I.D. editors Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, elegant online magazine Sight Unseen opens the door to the creative practice of tastemakers in art, fashion, and design.

With a host of intimate, browse-my-house visits, Sight Unseen is full of refreshingly candid and lucid artist profiles, all laid out in a format that showcases each subject’s words and works. The site also features sketchbooks, found objects, and compelling selections from glossies, books, and must-see exhibitions from around the world.

Explore Sight Unseen’s many departments, follow the site on Twitter, and learn how to submit your own art and story.

Andy Beach, America’s Favorites

Image from Raw Color’s This Is Basic exhibition

London’s Book Club by Shai Akram and Andrew Haythornthwaite

8 Things: Lisa Congdon

Mark Mahaney

Kostya Sasquatch

Kimm Whiskie

Premier Amour

It's been nearly two decades since Sami Frey so thoroughly incarnated that Theatre of Cruelty firebrand, Antonin Artaud. Now, he lends his sonorous voice to Beckett's francophone prose in this production of his short. The existential tale explores the relationship between a fille de joie and Frey's musing transient. It should be a mesmerizing performance by an actor who, once upon a time, wondered "if the world is a dream or a dream the world."

Stranger Than Fiction: Spring 2010

It's time: Like doves to Capistrano, lovers of the documentary form should head west each Tuesday to catch the best of the latest. IFC's intrepid series kicks off its new season with Steven Soderbergh's up-close portrait of the inimitable monologist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine. Past contributor Doug Block returns with another candid look at his family (after his ma-and-pa 51 Birch Street) with The Kids Grow Up — here the kid is his off-to-college daughter. Other highlights include John Walter's new score for Dziga Vertov's delirious, amped-up 1929 silent Man With a Movie Camera, Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi's look at the hoo-ha surrounding Mormon film censorship Cleanflix, and several hit titles from Sundance including Robin Hessman's Russia-today probe, My Perestroika.

Apartments and Neighbors, with a Special Guest from the Moth

As the phrase goes, there are eight million stories to be told in our close-set metropolis. Tonight's stories — by Carver, the obscure Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and the Carver-influenced Lasdun — offer just a few accounts of life in this city and the dissimilar inhabitants that make it teem. Yes, Parker Posey looks to be typically spirited and the lauded Sarah Jones would make a fascinating interpreter of Carver's spartan prose. But we're especially stoked for the witty and whip-smart David Rakoff.

Tom Shillue's TELL: World's Collide

The former Daily Show correspondent's got some hilarious chums, including his erstwhile coworker Aasif Mandvi, and for this edition of Shillue's oft-witty show, they air their most gutbusting tales. Stella members Michael Showalter and Andrea Rosen are sure to be risible, and Reggie Watts is likely to burst into song given his many skills, but Boris Timanovsky might end up being the most memorable. For his nine-to-five, the Moth StorySLAM contributor can be found managing the development of financial software, which provides him ample material to mine for laffs.

The Brooklyn Flea

As if Soler pupusas and AsiaDog's delectable hot dogs weren't enough, this year's incarnation of the beloved Flea features yet more local food vendors to expand the palette and dine-out map. Now in season three, the Flea's new vendors include Brooklyn Soda Works, Porchetta, and the Good Batch with its Dutch-style stroopwafels. And, of course, there's the other 100-something vendors selling you-name-it, from antique rugs to used records, fetching crafts to vintage threads.

The Newspaper Picture

Once upon a time, newspaper men and women — in all their wisecracking, get-the-story glory — could often be found performing their fact-checking up on the silver screen. Each daily in this inspired Fourth Estate series is worth a look, with many of the films still headliners: the most esteemed film of all time with Citizen Kane; the titleholder for the funniest screwball ever in His Girl Friday; and Capra galore with four titles including It Happened One Night. Other highlights include The Philadelphia Story, two by Sam Fuller, and top-shelf exposés on the biz's cold-blooded ambition with Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and Sweet Smell of Success.

The Private Collection of Henry Darger

Henry Darger is famous for being an outsider artist par excellence, but, with each passing year, the custodian's life in the Second City comes into focus more and more. Take this fascinating exhibition of the clippings, illustrations, and bits that adorned his room. Although Darger led a solitary life, this collection lays out the rich and various sources that left an enduring imprint on his singular art.

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

From Ireland to our island, these two wordsmiths have a throng of appreciators. This is a McCann-appropriate occasion to link up with a bunch of other prose lovers and listen to the inspiration and many editorial choices behind the National Book Award winner's fantastic, daisy-chained Let the Great World Spin. Chum Toibin, meanwhile, chats about his own gorgeous tale set in these zip codes, Brooklyn.

Close-Up

Forget Iran: Abbas Kiarostami is simply one of the world's superlative auteurs. And Close-Up, which the Tehran-born filmmaker made in between his famed Koker Trilogy, is arguably his greatest achievement. It's an ingenious plait of fact and fiction, a heartfelt exploration of the limits of film while parsing out the cinephile Sabzian's real-life trespass.

John Zorn and Friends

Composer for film is just one of John Zorn's résumé headers and tonight he's on his alto sax belting out an original, sure-to-be incredible score for a few 16mm wonders by Wallace Berman and Harry Smith, both polymathic talents from the mid-century. Berman's only assemblage, Aleph zips along ravishingly and it's supplemented with Artifactual's fascinating mash of casual and cast-aside footage. Smith's equally beautiful short teems with superimpositions and features brief appearances by the likes of Patti Smith and Robert Magglethorpe.

Sunrise

Seeing Sunrise for the first time is, in appropriately poetic terms, like seeing a luminous aurora. Be ready: your head is apt to become a looping projector of Murnau's famously sublime images, which gather up the pathos of George O'brien's split between tempting city and tender country. Often included on all-time-best lists, it's best seen on the big screen, hung up there like the rapturous, expressionistic painting it is.

Don McKay

Filmmaker Jake Goldberger’s fine debut has traces of both James M. Cain and the early Coen brothers in its curious, noir-tinted style.

Mislabeled as a thriller, this allusive film is more “ha-ha” than hardboiled. Thomas Haden Church plays a lonely, dulled-by-routine custodian who rushes home when a note arrives: his one-time love is dying. After 25 years away, he’s more compliant than Pavlov’s hound upon reuniting with the loony, blonde beaut (Elisabeth Shue). But, as in many a noir, nothing can be taken at face value, with the dark and knowing narrative leading to a surprising end.

Explore the official movie site, become a fan on Facebook, read an interview with writer/director Jake Goldberger, and watch the trailer for the Coens’ Blood Simple, one of the film’s main inspirations.

The Sun Behind the Clouds

"Free Tibet" may be a t-shirt catchphrase to some, but herein it's fleshed out as a lively sea of perspectives on the China-stamped region, the whole chorus pitched in a diplomatic key. Despite his billboard appearances, the Dalai Lama remains an alluring guru and this doc provides an edifying look at Tibet's now and and its all-important tomorrow.

"Long Live Pere Ubu!"

Cleveland represent! Tonight offers a fantastic sound and sight combo — think of it as 250%DV. The sounds are all Pere Ubu and their influential "avant-garage" music. The sights are also Pere Ubu, with David Thomas incarnating both ma and pa and the band the other roles. Best yet, behind the entertaining theatrics are outsized animations by the Brothers Quay, identical twins whose work with dolls is certified black and brilliant.

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance

Although this exhibition puts the past under the lens, it's curated with a lean toward the future, spotlighting several young, restless, and talented artists. Of course, it really doesn't hurt to feature work by Jeff Wall, whose art is as unassuming and monumental as his surname. Besides the hundred-or-so photographs, paintings, and other hung-up types, there are also great site-specific installations like Susan Philipsz's evocative rotunda sound work.

New York City Twestival 2010

This year's Twestival theme is "Recess" and it's a fitting one given the night's educational, do-good focus. Tonight, hundreds of cities host a festival to benefit Flavorpill's friends at Concern Worldwide, an organization that provides learning opportunities for the world's poorest children. New York's version of the shindig features music by Mister Disco and Shinbo Ninja, photographs by Maureen Pitz, and origami demonstrations by Sok Song (his giant Twitter birds are part of the raffle). The expansive, newly dug-up basement of the Hudson Hotel should be a perfect space for the revelry with a cause — you might even want to tweet about it.

Images of the World and the Inscription of War

Made nearly a half-century after those crucial topographic photographs of Auschwitz were shot, Farocki's incisive film essay also ties in France's push in the 1960s to snap veil-less Algerian women for identity cards. Jumping between and piling up images and theories, the German filmmaker offers plenty to debate in his exploration of truth and intent.

New Directors / New Films 2010

Twenty years ago, this venerable series included Days of Being Wild in its round up of new films by who-dat talent. Wong Kar-wai's luscious take on the folly and tenderness of youth was not his first film, but it was a neon-lit sign of things to come from the hep Hong Kong romantic. As in every other, this year's lineup is deep and diverse in potential. Among the fascinating pics are Samson and Delilah, a Caméra d'Or-winning aboriginal story; 3 Backyards, Eric Mendelsohn's superb trio of Long Island tales; and Down Terrace, a genre masher that follows a just-released father and son. The festival closes with the provocatively named and themed I Killed My Mother.

Modern Ruins, Urban Archaeology, and the Post-Industrial Sublime

Ruins can be eerily picturesque. After all, they are ghostly, outsize reminders of industry and inhabitation by those long gone. Tonight should be full of discovery, from eye-opening presentations by multidisciplinary artists Tarikh Korula, Ian Ference, and Julia Solis to the how-did-we-get-here discussion led by writer/editor Alan Rapp.

The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976

The High Priestess of Soul was an otherworldly talent, capable of both astral highs and ah-that-Simone lows. This documentary gets up close and personal with her capricious self for a performance that leaves you hypnotized and thunderstruck. A reworked "Feelings" is a highlight of the soulful set, while her famous temperament keeps things super lively to say the least. Historical reenactments and a special tribute performance round out a night to remember.

The Eclipse

Between grief and nothing, widower and father-of-two Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) chooses grief — a perfectly Gothic response in Irish dramatist Conor McPherson's excellent and often breathtaking new film. In this atmospheric and spectral portrait — apparitions and startling hues expertly double to rouse you from the beautifully lulling gloom — Michael gets psychologically and physically beaten out of his Edgar Allan "Woe" phase (his middle-aged, ecclesiastic face initially spells "nevermore" to the opposite sex) over a cathartic weekend spent volunteering at the local Cobh Literary Festival, for which he chauffeurs two writers caught in an internecine relationship themselves.

Cinema 16 w/ Sabrina Chap

The full, English title of Stella Simon's Hande is Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex. Made in tandem with Miklos Bandy, the experimental short charts the adventures of a feminist in Weimar Berlin, shuffling then-vogue styles in photography. It's just one of the three films that Sabrina Chap enlivens with her propulsive sound at tonight's Cinema 16 lineup. The other two titles are film pioneer W.K.L. Dickson's 7 Annabelle Dances and Dances, a 1894-97 series featuring Annabelle Moore's skirt-manipulating antics, and Gina Carducci's Stone Welcome Mat, an incredible look at memory and famiglia.

Vincere

Marco Bellocchio’s breathtaking new film provides Ida Dalser — Mussolini’s alleged first wife and the mother of Benito Junior — the voice and vitality that Il Duce took when he left them in asylums to perish anonymously.

In this full-bore cri de coeur for the missus, Bellocchio depicts Dalser as a feisty, resolute, and somewhat delusional woman, rather than some haloed madonna — a figure seared into memory by Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s impassioned performance. Bellocchio contextualizes the torn-out chapter of history with actual propaganda newsreels and declamatory texts that pulsate and surge from the screen.

The “polyexpressive” first half follows the superheated courtship between Dalser and a young, ambitious, but still idealistic Mussolini; her amour fou is pointedly made to parallel the countrywide hysteria for war and, soon enough, fascism. The quieter second half, meanwhile, focuses on her struggle to gain recognition and to reunite with her long lost son.

Read about the 2005 documentary that provides the backstory, learn more about Bellocchio’s storied career, watch Mussolini speak English in a rare 1929 Fox Movietone newsreel, and catch Vincere in theaters or on demand.

Mother

Mother knows best in Bong Joon-ho’s sinuous, first-rate whodunit, the South Korean director’s first feature since The Host in 2006.

Exquisitely played by Kim Hye-ja (an actress who spent decades in Korean minds as a TV mother), the title character coddles her unpredictable idiot of a son as if the 27-year-old were 7. They eat and even sleep beside each other until, one hazy night, he’s charged with the brutal murder of a poor high-school floozy. With her maternal instinct in overdrive, Mother conducts a town-wide probe to exonerate her child, leading to Hitchcockian suspense and a Pandora’s Box of repressed secrets.

From the first to last scene — both featuring Mother dancing like a possessed marionette — Bong pulls the audience’s strings with a nimble, precise hand. His now-famous compositional polish keeps the story fluent even as it cuts between psychotic and slapstick asides, the melodrama and policier genres. And with the diehard aegis of this mother as the core focus, Bong and Kim have crafted an indelible character to top his ever-growing gallery of monsters.

Check out an interview with Bong, read the New York Times review, and see Mother’s grades at the New York Film Festival.

US Pole Dancing Championship 2010

Tonight, a bodacious dozen try to become the top pole dancer in the land of the free. Yes, stereotypes abound. But, in its second go-around, the US Pole Dance Federation's National Championship only attests to the athleticism and art needed to maneuver one's body on a 12-footer. Expect an ah-inspiring two rounds since the event also bestows Miss Congeniality-like awards for Miss Trixter (most creative display of tricks, transitions, and combos) and Miss Sexy (no explanation necessary).