Prosthetic Chair

source: collectionsmadmuseumorg

One of the most innovative artists working in North America today, Gord Peteran has launched a boundary-crossing career, opening up the category of furniture to an unprecedented range of psychological and conceptual content. Cataloging the first large exhibition of his work in the U.S., Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker explores issues key to Peteran’s work including the use of the found object, the role of narrative in furniture, and the relationship between serial and one-off production.

Peteran’s work does not easily fit into the conventional categories of contemporary art, design, decorative art, or craft. He calls his pieces “furnitural,” a made-up term that suggests his unique relationship with sculpture. His furniture incorporates both found objects and examples of his own technical mastery. His pieces are conceptual, frequently non-functional, often witty, and meant to challenge pre-conceived notions of the boundaries between furniture and sculpture. The exhibition includes approximately twenty works in a variety of media.

Peteran’s means as a designer are sometimes disarmingly simple: his work A Table Made of Wood is cobbled together, seemingly at random, from scraps lying on his workshop floor. At other times, he employs craftsmanship of the highest order, as in 100, a precisely machined occasional table that disassembles into a carrying case like that used for a rifle. Other works suggest specimen cabinets, seesaws and game tables, all twisted into new relevance through subtle manipulation.

Gord Peteran often starts with a found object: a rickety ladder-back chair, scrap wood from a dumpster, a pencil, or a heap of twigs. He takes one of these objects and operates on it, creating an artwork while leaving the object itself more or less intact. In this way, Peteran has taken the category of furniture as a found object in its own right, an object to be operated upon conceptually. At Peteran’s hands furniture dies a fascinating death, without ever quite going away.

Peteran’s Musical Box, commissioned by the Glenn Gould Foundation for its Glenn Gould Prize in 1996, is a machine for testing sounds. Its mechanisms are each operated by a brass and ebony knob. One internal device is a globe containing smooth rocks from the bottom of a fish tank, which swish together when the globe is turned. There is a crude xylophone, an even cruder geared music box, a contraption consisting of different lengths of metal rod that strike a piece of plastic when they are rotated, and a reed sounded by a homemade bellows. Turn another knob, and a single string is plucked by a Fender guitar pick. The box does for music what Peteran’s work normally does for furniture—isolating the medium’s basic premises and freezing them in a state of arrested development.

Ark is Peteran’s most complex and monumental work. Quarter-sawn red oak panels make up the exterior project. Bronze rings top each corner, suggesting that the whole work is meant to be portable, perhaps through the agency of ceremonial bearers armed with long poles. The interior is luxuriously upholstered in plush, hand-tufted red velvet. The overall form brings to mind a bewildering variety of furniture-related precedents: a sedan chair, a confessional, a throne, a phone booth, and even an electric chair. The last association is particularly strong because of the mysterious black electrical cord that snakes away from the piece. When a person enters Ark and closes the door, an overhead light automatically illuminates. Suddenly the user is put on view, enclosed in a luxurious but airless chamber. When in use, Ark becomes a double-edged and many-layered metaphor that calls forth numerous oppositions: exhibitionism and privacy, coziness and claustrophobia, display and functionality, privilege and death.

Peteran draws almost constantly, an artistic exercise that finds its way into his work in surprising ways. Electric Chair (2004) consists of the tubular steel frame of a found Marcel Breuer–style chair, a cord, and a light bulb. The artist has described the work as “a drawing in space.” The piece is one of Peteran’s simplest and most direct ideas.

Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets Its Maker is the second installation at the Museum’s new Design and Innovation Gallery, a new initiative for temporary exhibitions that reflect the Museum’s focus on innovation in design, emerging trends and distinguished voices within the field.

Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets Its Maker is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chipstone Foundation, with generous support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. For more information on ordering the catalog, call The Store at 212-299-7700 or click here.
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source: apacheocadca

Gordon Peteran has been creating site-specific works of art and furniture for private and public spaces since 1979. He has exhibited and lectured extensively. While a faculty member at the Ontario College of Art & Design, he has also taught at Sheridan College, School of Arts & Crafts, the Rhode Island school of Design, Haystack School of Craft in Maine, and Anderson Ranch in Colorado. In 2000 Peteran was a committee member hosting the 4th International Furniture Society Conference in Toronto. His work is held in many public and private collections.