chairs

This idea first came about when I was chatting with my Ma one day some years back. She told me about this time during her senior year at college. My Pop’s was back in Illinois for the year and she was lonely. She was telling me how she didn’t want to sit alone at the dinner table so she would sit stuffed animals in the chairs to bring presence to the table. It got me thinking about the use of a chair, and the relationship a chair provides to us. It progressed from there. I wanted to see what would happen if I took the persona of a portrait and placed it in the frame of a functional chair. Could it create dialogue and human presence, and what would expound from this?

For this exhibition I acquired my chairs from a variety of sources. Some chairs where found on the side of the road, others at Goodwill’s and Consignment shops, all where previously used as a chair. During the process of making the chair people I questioned how much I wanted to alter the chair to fit the persona of the portrait and vise versa? The chairs that are painted were found that way. In the end, the only alterations I made were structural ones.