‘Beauty Is in the Bulb’

For someone whose raison d’etre is light, West Hollywood resident Alison Berger’s 1920s apartment/studio is apt, since it functions almost as a prism. Floor-to-ceiling windows reflect and refract the morning sunlight as naturally as the transparent crystal works she designs. These include lighting fixtures as well as tableware; one of her hanging fixtures is suspended in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, its soft light a welcoming beacon, much like a candle burning centuries ago for returning voyagers.

“The medium I work with is light, and the materiality is glass,” says Berger, 39. “I create objects that may have a historical basis. For example, I look at 4th century Greek urns and synthesize them down to their essence. It’s almost like memory where you select certain details from your own perception because that’s what you like to remember.”

Berger begins by asking herself how she can contain electric candlelight. “In the Jewish religion, there’s something called an everlasting light. My lighting is really based on that notion, that the lights are on all the time, that they’re like candlelight. They create tone and atmosphere, and while they can be turned up to be quite bright and functional, they’re really about something being at home waiting for you, imparting feelings of calmness and serenity,” says Berger.

Born in Dallas, Berger has been intrigued by light since she was very young, and has blown glass since she was 15. She has a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and trained as an architect at Columbia University School of Architecture. She has worked with architect Frank Gehry as well as at Bausman-Gill Associates, where as project designer she collaborated on the award-winning corporate headquarters for Warner Bros. Records in New York’s Rockefeller Center.

She’s designed glass objects in the studio of artist Dale Chihuly, for an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and for Steuben Glass, and has works in the Corning Museum’s 20th century design collection. She moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago to track the light here and for the ease of using local craftsmen to manufacture her designs.

Still, no matter what Berger is doing, she is always looking at light. “I ask, how is it contained, how is it held, how is it reflected and refracted? There’s a very illusionary, ephemeral quality to glass,” she says. And so her bell-jar-like glass shades frame the lightbulb and become part of it.

Anyone who’s taken the time to watch light rays color and illuminate glass will understand her deceptively simple light fixtures. All are blown freehand, and no two are completely alike.

“The form is contained; it’s stripped down to its essence. There’s not a big story because, to me, light is light. The beauty is in the bulb and the subtlety of the light. It’s very meditative,” she says. She has a line of five hanging lights and one floor lamp, all of which take 60-watt bulbs, and can be dimmed as low as five watts.

“There’s a real struggle in what I do, in that I show the indigenous quality of the material used, like the cords and bubbles in the glass, which is what you see in old glass. I’m not romanticizing the process and trying to re-create the past, but I’m trying to do pieces that are about the material,” Berger says. A whimsical inspiration for her lights are the fireflies she used to catch in glass jars when she was a child.

The crystals in Berger’s fixtures undulate and change as the light hits them. The material is substantial and not perfect. “It wasn’t until machines made glass that it became thin like our drinking glasses,” she says. “I’m going back to the idea of glass being special, which is why the aristocracy owned it, because it embodied the rituals and culture of the times.”

In addition to her lighting fixtures, Berger is working on a new series of crystal tableware for Hermes, and she’s in the process of reinventing timepieces. “I’m working on a series of clocks that project time, perhaps having a lens that would actually move to show time passing. I’m working on a vessel where the watch face is recessed inside the glass so on elevation you can’t see it. The time within it is reduced in scale so it’s caught, almost like a fly in a glass Victorian flycatcher.”

She laughingly calls it a therapy clock for people who want to sneak peeks at the time without being seen.

So Berger continues to experiment with light, glass and, now, time. “How much do we have at home that has that contemplative, home-waiting-for-you feeling?” she asks. “That’s what I’m trying to create.”

Berger’s lighting fixtures are represented locally at Plug, 8017 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. Prices range from $800 to more than $8,000, depending on size.

Kathy Bryant may be reached at kbryant@socal.rr.com.