And other times we do, and when we do, we focus on whatever the discovery is and turn it into a piece. Instead of applying an idea to a material, what we try to do is open up these pockets of time where we experiment in an analog way without any kind of predetermined direction or intent in the hopes of discovering something. So over the last four or five years we’ve been really trying consciously to step backwards in the authorship process. In other words, I learned that my ego was an obstacle to achieving great work. The piece was successful or interesting only because of that contingency. My original intent led me down the path of experimenting with materials, and inevitably the material experimentation yielded some sort of discovery, or some sort of alchemical, phenomenological moment, some sort of transcendent event. But as I came to have more and more work realized, I found that actually the only interesting things that occurred in the work, the reason why the work was interesting, had a lot more to do with unexpected contingencies than with my original intent. “I would have an idea independently of any kind of context, a formal idea, and then I’d use whatever resources were available to me to bring that idea to fruition. Here’s one, for example, because I can’t really write it any better than he said it. Throughout our conversation he speaks in paragraphs as precise and well-considered as his designs. If you reached the podium at the 2010 Olympics – and if you did, congrats, seriously – you actually own some of his work yup, Omer designed the medals.Ĭlearly, the dude is brilliant. If you’ve wandered through the sky-lit concrete majesty of Inform Interior’s Gastown location, you’ve been inside his work. If you’ve ever ordered a burrito at Tacofino or grabbed an Americano from Gene and wondered at the otherworldly lights above you, you’ve seen Omer’s work. Under his other company, Omer Arbel Office, he designs furniture and objects and undertakes architectural projects. The pieces they create have gained international acclaim for their fluid, graceful style rather than simply emit light, they seem to encapsulate it, as if they’d frozen it solid mid-flight. One of Omer’s various roles is as the creative director at Bocci, a Vancouver company that specializes in shaping light. I feel very much like I’m sitting inside his brain. On the opposite wall is mounted a copper ornament with a polished central disc encircled by a haphazard, black rim. 1, a shelving unit he designed, which holds dozens of additional glass globes, prototypes of his light fixtures. Above us hangs one of this ornate chandeliers, a hybrid of copper wire and colourful glass spheres. It’s like a rolling landscape cast in marble, with smooth, wave-like divots scooped out. We sit at a circular table of his design. By Grady Mitchell | Omer Arbel leans back in a chair in Vancouver’s most attractive conference room, surrounded by the objects he and his team have made, all of them beautiful.
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