found chairs and artifacts, Mythic paint, 2008, approx. 18” x 18” x 32”
Imagine if Walker Evans and Louise Nevelson fell in love and drove down south to spend a year, they would make chairs like this for their garden party. They would never be compatible in the traditional sense of the word, but they could throw a good bash. The Walker and Louise Chairs were generated from a series of Polaroids where I spliced together two chair halves. Seeing that the reality would be a structural challenge I spliced many real chairs together to realize this optical idea.
The Walker and Louise Chairs exhibited here are a further development of the Walker Evans Chairs as well as a structural test: if all chairs have a parameter of at least 18 inches high and 18” x 18” wide seats and no two are the same, are they interchangeable? A set of collaged Polaroids suggested that they might be compatible and comfortable in a surreal vein, but actually constructing them was a different matter.
The lesson was that they could be put together but they were not structurally sound. The chairs then produced a metaphorical structural condition and a biographical allusion to Evans’ relationships with women. Louise Nevelson arrives in the story as a guide to the method of making the chairs.
Fabrication assistance by Nels Long
