Dancing lights: Lindsey Adelman’s studio reveals music video and new collection at New York’s Wright gallery

On the opening night of lighting designer Lindsey Adelman’s new installation, a group of 16 dancers pulsed their way through a music video that looped in a dark room at Wright, a gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 

The cast of the video – from the dancers to the song’s composer, Leo Madriz – wasn’t the progeny of Lady Gaga (though they clearly know her repertoire), but rather Adelman and others from her studio; Laura Young, Adelman’s former director of operations, is the lead vocalist. The choreography is no joke, but they’re clearly having some fun. The video for ’Show Me’ – the title of both the song and the exhibition – features pieces from the New York-based designer’s latest collection. With punk-inflected jewellery (fringed, gold ear cuffs and leather bracelets with gold quills) to gilded mirrors adorned with waves of mushroom gills and luminaries reminiscent of some of Adelman’s ’Cherry Bomb’ fixtures, the clip has a neat gothic sensibility, mixed with a smattering of a A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The jewellery and mirrors – as well as a five-foot-long gold candelabrum, flickering away even as the crowd squeezed close to it –  helped to set an alluringly dark-romantic mood.

Adelman opened the studio in 2006 with her first product, the ’Branching Bubble’ chandelier; since then, the business has expanded with many more fixtures and a range of home objects. She sees her evolution into other mediums as a natural progression of the studio’s work, as well as an excuse to do something fun. ’I’m folding in the personal interests of the company,’ Adelman says in the catalogue accompanying the show. ’People often ask that first question, "How did you come up with this idea of doing a music video?", when it doesn’t feel like that at all. It just feels like it was in me, and I got an opportunity to let it out and bring my daily work life into it.’