This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.

I’ve moved 11 times since leaving home after high school and in all of those moves the one thing I still really mourn losing is a night-light. It was this small sun with a smiling face, left at my Brooklyn apartment in the winter of 2021 when my partner at the time and I were packing everything we could into one car to drive across the country and move to Los Angeles. I’d had it since I was a kid, this small simple piece of plastic of which there are 1,000 iterations, but when I google “sun smiling face night-light” not a single one of them replicates the warmth and joy of the one I’d held onto for 15 years or so until that point. Somewhere around Ohio on that trip, I sat in the passenger seat crying and frantically tweaking my keywords trying to arrive at an eBay or Mercari result that would bring this night-light back to me.

I never did find a copy of that light, but an exhibition at New York Design Week offered several suitable alternatives. For their New York Design Week exhibition this year, which is up through June 26, Jonald Dudd partnered with gallery The Future Perfect to present original night-light designs from over 120 designers. The lights are displayed in The Future Perfect townhouse in the West Village, with half in the basement and the other half on an upper floor next to the stairwell. The darkness of the basement was particularly pleasing to me. It reminded me of the darkened Hall of Gems at the Natural History Museum (pre-renovation), the dim lighting making it feel like you’re actually discovering something—which in this case you are, assuming you don’t already have an encyclopedic knowledge of the American design scene.

There’s an LED light covered in faux fur, resembling a radiant tail, by Studio Daae. A twee, striped wooden bow by Lauren Lauer. A snowglobe-like porcelain depiction of 7-Eleven by Stefanie Haining. Nino Chamber’s tiny poplin “Nightshirt” and Nicholas Baker’s “Reading Man” both put me in the mood for bedtime in the best way possible. I’ll admit my bias that there are several pieces by friends in the show too, including Sophie Collé whose hanging chains on “Deco Delight” I’m particularly charmed by, and my boyfriend Cooper Lovano’s “The Gnat and the Bull,” a wood veneered piece that’s inspired by the Aesop’s Fable of the same. What I love about night-lights is the particular kind of intimacy you develop with them, given that they’re all you’re seeing in the hours when they serve their purpose. The oddity of most of these designs seems to honor that intimacy—even the relatively simple pieces give you something meaty enough to ponder night after night of use.

I’m always impressed with the curation of Jonald Dudd—I discovered some of my favorite designers, including Outgoing and Yuxuan Huang, at their showcase last year at Shelter—but their and The Future Perfect’s selection this year is really remarkable. There are so many energizing perspectives on display, a near maddening array of interpretations for what a night-light can be. Jonald Dudd is put on by Dudd Haus, a Philadelphia gallery cofounded by Chris Held and Charles Constantine. Held, who’s also its creative director, explained via email how they and Laura Ann Young of The Future Perfect curated the show. “We were looking for fresh takes on old tropes, new material explorations, and formal sophistication (though sometimes formal naivety works out),” Held shared. “I think Charles, Laura, and I share a similar sense of humor, so making all three of us laugh was a pretty good strategy for getting your work accepted.”

Indeed, a sense of humor unites the pieces, some lighthearted, others a little more dark-sided. Like my childhood sun plug in, by and large these lights are friendly companions for nighttime walks to the refrigerator. It’s just up to the buyers whether they’d prefer an altar to Luigi Mangione or a glowing sausage to be what they’re seeing at 3 a.m.

Top photo by David Sierra

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