Lindsey Adelman presents Paradise City

Lindsey Adelman’s new lighting collection, Paradise City, finds inspiration in disparate sources, from W. Somerset Maugham to Axl Rose, expressed through a visual language recalling Helmut Newton’s famous photograph of model Nadja Auermann donning a menacing leg brace. In Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge we learn that “nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.” Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses surely agrees: “So never mind the darkness/ We still can find a way/ ‘Cause nothin’ lasts forever/ Even cold November rain.”

The temptation to hold on to every moment is conveyed in this installation through the network of slender rods that pin and bind the voluptuous hand-blown glass. The polished, architectural scaffolding creates an illusion of arresting change or stopping time. The hardware both supports and controls the natural gestures of the wild, illuminated forms.
The resulting effect reminds us of our familiar struggle to “take delight” in what’s happening now, an effort that simultaneously separates and binds us. We look to each other to let change take its natural course, even when it terrifies, “‘cause nothin’ lasts forever.”

Lindsey Adelman’s work treads the porous border between sculpture and design, taking inspiration from such diverse sources as the paintings of Piet Mondrian, an elegiac passage from Albert Camus’s The Fall, and the spidery brilliance of Alberto Giacometti. Combining organic, handwrought materials like blown glass with the strong, industrial beauty of machine-milled components, her lighting systems create radiant warmth while underscoring the drama of shadows and emptiness. Her studio, founded in 2006, designs, prototypes, and builds in-house, collaborating with a close circle of local manufacturers to produce their signature lighting.