These scowling girls in headscarves are clearly up to no good. The question is what? Kiersten Essenpreis is the artist with the answer.

Katrin Korfmann uses video stills as the many elements of her light boxes where many small parts make up the whole.

Nora Herting’s cheerleaders are given space to perform their routines upon flocking.

A city skyline of highrises made from make-up, daydreaming on a train trip and a little lighting shopping are but three topics covered by illustrator Moira Millman.

Rodger Roundy has many paintings of brunette schoolgirls and gathering words and pages to delve into. Roundy’s website is well worth a tour. SM

More at Art MoCo.

Seoul-based Won J. Heo recently showed a couple of pieces during the Seoul Design Festival last December. Both his lighting and mirror use luminescent acrylic panels that make for eerily beautiful designs of a modern baroque nature. The pendant lamp is like a bulbless shade and the mirror is especially exciting with its frame aglow.

Luflic had some amazing chairs at Toronto’s Interior Design Show this past weekend, really catching the collective eye with two pieces called In The Round. Both these production-ready chairs, designed by Brent Cordner, are named after the in-the-round knitting technique and over 50 feet of wool sleeve is used to cover the tubular steel frame for the felt version and 30 feet for the stitch version. The Snowshoe chair (after the jump) won an award at IDS for Best prototype and it is an incredibly light chair made from a composite of wood and Kevlar and based on the traditional snowshoe. The Meander chair is a continuous length of nickel-reinforced copper tubing that results in surprisingly comfortable sculptural seating.

+ luflic.com

Zac Ridgely from Ridgely Studio Works was at IDS08 to launch his new Luster lights. The Luster chandelier was an impressive piece of lighting that fit perfectly into the IDS opening them of Decadence, all black and gold with the warm light pouring out so richly. The Luster sconces were equally high drama, though more mysterious, given the subtlety of their shape and forms. Ridgely uses aluminum that is anodized gold and then sculpted by hand, so each Luster is is one-of-a-kind piece.

+ ridgelystudioworks.com

Staying at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto gave us an opportunity to get a closer look than most at the Come Up To My Room exhibit on display there. One of our favorite exhibits was Jade Rude's "frames" shown on the walls of the stairs on the way up to the show. We met with Jade to discuss her work and we had two questions... more after the jump. JGB

+ jaderude.com
+ gladstonehotel.com

We went to see the North American premiere of Awadare tonight at design gallery Commissaires in Montreal. Awadare is a furniture collection that combines austere painted steel frames with babiche, a leather weaving technique with aboriginal origins that many will recognize from traditional snowshoes. The juxtaposition is striking, the two extremes of structured manufactured modernity and an ancient organic form. That's Mush! above, a lounge chair with a metal base that resembles the runners on a sled. Awadare is the first collection by Samare, a design collective made up of four architect designers (Laurie Bedikian, Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, Mania Bedikian and Patrick Meirim de Barros) who first met at the University of Montreal. After Commissaires the collection is off to Milan and SaloneSatellite, the launch pad for up-and-coming designers.

+ samare.ca