3/31/2023 0 Comments House of gord chair![]() But it has to be a certain kind of quality. A three-dimensional object standing in space can be far more challenging.?īut certain objects just speak to me dilapidated examples in the garbage just beg to be dealt with in some way or reconditioned or redirected. ?I moved away from painting toward more three-dimensional work because there is much more risk involved. ?I was very interested in continuing to make furniture as long as I could make it in the way I wanted to make it and say the things I felt were important to say,? he reflects. At some point his craft began to overlap his art. In the process he learned woodworking and metalworking and began making furniture. At the same time he began working with an uncle who restored antiques, something he still continues to do. Peteran started out pursuing drawing and painting at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where he now teaches. ?It is made from rough walnut boards milled to perfection,? he said, ?and finished to perfection.? One piece, among his favorites, is ?Two,? a pair of supine chairs conjoined at the legs like Siamese twins and perched in a brass cradle. Peteran in fact is eminently capable of fine furniture making and some of his pieces reflect a beautifully skilled planing, execution and aesthetic. It?s a play on the purposefully rustic aesthetic popularized by Thomas Chippendale back in the mid 18th century. When an image of it appeared in ?Woodwork? magazine, it set off a firestorm of letters both pro and con.Īn even cruder example of a demilune is Peteran?s ?An Early Table,? a collection of twigs held together in the shape of a table with string. One of his demilunes, ?A Table Made of Wood,? is a sorry collection of scrap wood salvaged from his workshop floor and made in the shape of a classic half table. ?If you go to a furniture store and buy one, they sit in people?s homes as a sort of standard in the hall. Take for instance, your classic demilune ? those halfmoon consoles made to occupy the space in a foyer or entry.Īs a commonplace item found in many homes, it?s an archaic item that intrigues Peteran. Or as Glen Adamson, who curated the exhibit for the Milwaukee Art Museum and who now works at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, observes of Peteran in the exhibit catalogue, ?At Peteran?s hands furniture dies a fascinating death, without ever quite going away.? I tear furniture apart, stir up the information and re-configure it,? he explains. ?I?m a sculptor who explores the ideas we have spent generations attaching to the objects of the home, specially furniture. But he suspects he may be alone in the way he ?dismembers the subject matter of furniture. Peteran acknowledges he?s not the first artist to use furniture as a key element and theme. ![]() Chairman of the furniture department at California College of the Arts, Fortescue maintained a commercial furniture studio in Australia for 10 years, and worked with leading furniture makers and craftspeople in Australia, the U.K., Japan, and the United States. Peteran?s wickedly whimsical take on furniture will appear with a companion exhibit of pieces by Donald Fortescue, whose fine woodworking and focus on a range of materials in their purest form, from stainless steel and Lycra to cast bronze and glass, also bridges the boundary between furniture and art. It?s not quite a table, but more than a table,? he says with unmasked fiendish delight. ![]() ![]() ?Sometimes people coming into homes of collectors of my work at first don?t notice the evil lurking, and that gives the owners great delight when their guests do notice things. ?People say, ?What?s that? So I say ?That?s furniture, not sculpture,? and see what they do next,? he impishly says in a phone interview from Toronto, where he maintains both a ?dry? work design studio at home and a ?dirty workshop? where he fabricates, milling lumber in traditional ways and machining metal. A traveling exhibit of his provocative work, which he has dubbed ?furnitural,? opens today at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and runs through March 1. That?s part of the fun of Peteran?s peerless furniture sculpture, aimed at making you re-examine how you perceive the everyday objects in your home. Is it furniture, or is it art? You decide. The tubular steel frame of a Marcel Breuer chair, wired and lit with a single bulb, becomes ?Electric Chair.? Or ponder ?Mechanics of Memory,? an assemblage of found objects from a kiddie swing to a set of horns, all hanging from a wooden coat rack you might place beside your front door. In his wickedly subversive hands, a chair, a clock, a table, are re-imagined into intriguing evocations of their former selves. In Gord Peteran?s workshop, mute household objects are made to spill their secrets as they evolve into something else.Ī fine cabinetmaker as well as a conceptual artist, Peteran is the Dr.
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