New Footage Released of Jay-Z's Giant Crystal Collaboration with Joanie Lemercier

Return to 'Quartz,' the giant, mirrored structure that Joanie Lemercier and Kyle McDonald installed in Barney's department store windows during their 2014 holiday season.

by Emerson Rosenthal

May 11, 2015, 2:10pm

QUARTZ from Joanie Lemercier on Vimeo.

The Roc was in the building over holiday season 2014, as Jay-Z's collaboration with Barneys took over the iconic department store's window displays with a tryptich of installations known as Light Fragments, directed by French visual artist Joanie Lemercier with a host of audio and visual talents. Five days ago, Lemercier released a new video of Quartz—created with technical design and development from media artist Kyle McDonald, and sound design by Thomas Vaquié—the second piece in the series, a giant crystalline sculpture covered in thousands of tiny mirrors.

"Mimicking a crystal, the crenulated surface absorbs light and refracts it into exploding cosmic patterns on the surrounding surfaces," Lemercier writes on his website. "As the light source shifts, the form’s structure and visual output are altered," creating something like a disco ball by-way-of stalactites, a dazzling visual metaphor for the stone strata atop which the city sits. What's more, the 99 CNC'ed foam pieces that compose it were covered with a mirrored fabric by hand, an obvious exploration of the meticulous processes imbued in Lemercier's works, like his dot-drawn topographies and projected 3D architectures.

Watch Quartz in action above, and watch a behind-the-scenes video of Jay-Z's Barneys collaboration with Joanie Lemercier below:

The Making of a New York Holiday from Barneys The Window on Vimeo.