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At the dawn of television, 1950s consumers snapped up TV lamps: decorative fixtures that sat atop the boxes, gently illuminating dark living rooms. Shaped like birds, boats and plant-life, the kitschy TV straddlers are now retro collectibles — but their legacy lives on in a new class of novelty lamps prized more for their charm than their function.
In an era where Gen Z is championing maximalist “dopamine decor” and home accessories shaped like food, mood-boosting designs are becoming an increasingly popular way to punctuate a room and broadcast your sense of humour. A range of modern versions have elevated their design to tongue-in-cheek art pieces.
Decorative pop art lighting is a signature for Italian brand Seletti. Its 2023 “Vitamin” collection of lights is made to look like greengrocers’ produce. For another recent table lamp, exhibited at the Maison&Objet fair in Paris this September, it rendered a Fiat 500 in miniature beneath a light-up cloud.
The brand’s art director, Stefano Seletti, compares these kinds of lamps to pets. “They are reassuring presences in the home that give you a sense of comfort,” he says, adding that some shoppers even like to name their lamps.
Autumn Casey, a Miami-based artist who creates whimsical decorative lighting inspired by nature, also thinks of her lamps as characters with distinct personalities. Her designs — such as the cartoonish “Queen Broccoli” lamp, inspired by a local tree — softly glow through layers of painted fabric. “I have an affinity for objects in general and enjoy transmuting my emotions on to them,” Casey says, adding that she hopes buyers will form their own connections to her designs.
Some novelty lamps are actually designed to feel alive. Brooklyn-based artist Kickie Chudikova’s “Pulpopolis” collection, exhibited at Alcova Milano in April this year, was informed by her life-long fascination with marine life. The vibrant Murano glass pieces aim to capture the “delicate, otherworldly beauty” of jellyfish in motion, Chudikova explains, and resemble sculptural Pixar sidekicks.
There is also Brooklyn-based Caleb Ferris’s “Bug Zapper” lamp: an arthropod-like silhouette which emits a warm halo to draw people in like a moth to a flame — as the name implies. The form itself, an elegant plywood shape made “dangerous, curious, and mysterious” thanks to black paint and a weathered finish, looks as if it might scurry up the wall.
A dash of play and humour is a key trait of these designs, along with nostalgia. “As creatives, we’re subject to the viewer and their interpretation of it,” Ferris says. “By controlling the narrative, by drawing heavily on everyday objects, I feel like I’m in on the joke.”
Artist Chloe Wise, who often recreates elements of food in her work, recently produced a collection of impressively lifelike lighting for the Water Street Projects’ new exhibition, Yes, Chef, at New York’s Water Street Association. There were Art Deco-style chandeliers styled after tiers of seafood and crudités dripping in dressing. As extravagant homages to finger foods, the works were a new entry in the campy foodification of decor that has yielded salami candles and stools shaped like fruit.
Even common appliances have become the punchline for these kinds of collectible lights-slash-art pieces. At Brooklyn bookstore Head Hi’s lamp show this year, one conversation starter was “The Glowster”, which emits light through a foam piece of “toast” wedged inside a real vintage toaster. Brooklyn-based creative technologist Pujarini Ghosh (who worked with creative technologist Adnan Aga and design engineer Usman Jamil on it) said the group spun through various household objects before settling on the humble toaster as a base. The lever doubles as the on/off switch for the light source, while the temperature dial acts as a dimmer.
Ghosh explains this trend towards novelty lamps as a natural result of people challenging themselves to reframe the familiar, perhaps using the functionality of an existing item to create something different altogether: “Right now our brain is like, ‘we can turn anything into a lamp’.”
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