WANT Les Essentiels Kicks-Off New Designer Showcase Series With Bec Brittain: Perception + Reflection
WANT’s newly designated creative director, Christine Charlebois aims to cultivate a harmonious community that understands the increasingly deep shift in the worlds of design and fashion and that shares an interest in seeing both worlds in collaboration. As a result, contemporary and cutting-edge designers from the worlds of lighting, furniture, sculpture and visual arts are carefully chosen to showcase their masterly work at WANT’s West Village boutique on 301 West 4th Street in New York City.
With the boundaries between the two worlds of design and fashion becoming increasingly thin and the connections becoming even more intriguing, this new series of exhibitions will explore the parallel practices in both disciplines all while highlighting the research and methods involved. Christine Charlebois, ever-captivated by architecture and design, wants to spark a rich dialogue with artists and designers from various creative disciplines who share similar values to WANT, inviting them to exchange on a myriad of pertinent concepts inherent in their work such as sustainability, minimalism as a way of life, functionality, time, and more. In that vein, she recently introduced Le Corbusier-inspired concrete displays at the New York store, consequently merging fashion and architecture together, and allowing the discerning WANT clientele to observe new interests and possibilities in both practices. The ongoing series of designer showcases will transform the store into a collaborative space extending the flow of conversations around fashion, design, and the arts, and allowing the expression of ideas of personal, social and cultural identity.
The first showcase features New-York based lighting designer, Bec Brittain with a new installation of her acclaimed, playful and sculptural Shy beam pieces entitled Perception + Reflection. Simple and sophisticated, her handcrafted LED beams can be arranged in endless ways brilliantly transforming an interior with each configuration. Her custom lighting installation for the boutique features a series of suspended trapezoidal mirrors and cylindrical LED tubes that hang and interact with the light. ‘Climbing Beams’, thin LED tubes combined with modular brass hardware connect the wall to the ceiling while ‘Wall Flags’, which combine the brass tube beams with sheets of peach, grey and smoked glass, seem to rise from the floor to climb up the walls. ‘Hanging Flag’, another interplay between the LED beams and one large, flag-shaped sheet of glass, casts the store aglow in a peachy palette.
Perfectly at home in a space where sleek and timeless essentials for the modern urban traveller prevail, Bec Brittain’s installation echoes WANT’s minimal and refined aesthetic. “WANT has such a solid history of quiet but exquisitely produced work that transcends trends,” says Brittain. “And ultimately, that’s my own personal brief too.” Driven by a love of materials and innovative techniques and a fascination with reflection and light, Bec Brittain designs versatile and adaptable light structures that form new and intriguing shapes and silhouettes and that constantly confound traditional ideas of lighting.
"We share a similar approach to design. It felt like a natural evolution for us to work together on this installation,” commented Christine Charlebois. “Bec's work adds a new perspective to the store. The light gives another dimension to the boutique and the mirrors allow us to see every part of the space from a surprising angle. A festive yet mysterious atmosphere.”
Perception + Reflection is on view at WANT Les Essentiels, 301 West 4th Street, NYC until February 15, 2019.
