Cytter / Roebas

Evocative lighting fixtures are critical to setting an interior atmosphere. Lamps, lanterns, and sconces serve as practical instruments, spatial flourishes, or design articles belonging to minimalist furniture catalogues or high-minded architectural documentaries. Chandeliers, however, connote a distinct feeling. They are romantic entities, whose chief purpose is to broadcast their mortality and obsolescence. They are perpetually anachronistic, and never to achieve the modern or contemporary. They articulate faded glory, stereotyping itself and all those it bathes with its contaminated cast. Embalmment in celluloid is a chandelier’s predestination. It’s a beaten-down has-been, a supporting player, who might still lend the last of their aura to a stuffy ballroom soiree, the library shelves in a derelict castle, or overcompensate for a huddle of sweaty clients in the sitting area of a back-alley brothel. Through dramatically fusing awkward relationships of materials and light, Keren Cytter and John Roebas collaboratively devised three-dimensional counterparts to Cytter’s filmic constructions. Possibly reconstituted from the detritus of closed-down restaurants or failed red-light businesses, these chandeliers center conversation, disorient passerby, and revel in their dysfunction.