Annika Hagen and Nicole Fox spotlight international designers in their second annual lamp design competition.

lamp exhibitionFilament lamp, pictured above, designed by  Dylan Woock and Amelia Tyson.With a background in film and dance, Annika Hagen and Nicole Fox have stood in the spotlight for much of their lives. This week, however, the two founders of the Lighting Architecture Movement Project (LAMP) are turning the tables—from November 20-24, they’re spotlighting award-winning entries from their lamp design competition.It’s the second year the pair have hosted a lighting exhibition, but the first time that they made an open call for design submissions. In 2013, Hagen and Fox asked ten designers to revamp identical column-shaped floor lamps. “We had so many people say they wished they could have designed one too,” Hagen says, and so this time around, they decided to make LAMP into a global competition. “We received over fifty submissions from thirteen countries,” Hagen says. Adds Fox, “And that was within just a month and a half.”Each entry took the word “fibre” as its starting point—but that’s where the similarities end. Fixtures range from sculptural aluminum pipes (“Macro” by Arno Matis) to a fungi-inspired sphere pendant in shades of canary yellow and mossy green (“Hyphae” by Jody Bielun). One piece even explores light as the “moral fibre” of our communities (“WE WILL LEARN” by Theunis Snyman and Jesi Carson). For Hagen and Fox, the joy lies in seeing those initial sketches realized. “Lenticular” by Aaron Zenga, for example, came to them as a simple sketch of copper circles—but the resulting fixture is anything but ordinary.“The thing about lighting,” Fox says, “is that it can transform the whole space. It adds warmth to a room.” Certainly, the exhibition bears out her statement. Lit by this collection of lamps, the cavernous gallery space at 188 Kingsway, Vancouver, reads as inviting. And for Hagen and Fox, that’s the whole point of LAMP: to render high concept lighting design accessible to the general public. As Fox says, “Everyone can come see it, everyone can have an opinion.”For more information, please visit welovelamp.ca

Chelsea Pratt

Chelsea Pratt