[arcade vol. 26.04; an excerpt from erin kendig's review of drop city gallery's "take a seat" exhibition]

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Take a Seat, Look, Time… / Erin Kendig

Seth Grizzle and Jonathan Junker of Graypants created Scrap Chair, a process-oriented project encompassing a series of prototypical chairs crafted from recycled cardboard, newspaper, freight pallet slip sheets, and a final chair made of salvaged scrap plywood.  The series was nearly linear, an evolution: each chair gave birth, conceptually, to a new chair.  The overall work not only used “sustainable” materials, but was creatively sustainable as each piece aided in an ongoing imaginative genesis.  Art begat art, design begat design.  They made one chair.  And then they made another.  And Another.  And then they made lamps and an end table (complimentary pieces that used remaining materials from the chairs).

The final chair, created by layering plywood in thin increments from bottom to top, came together softly, organically, the layers converging like sedimentary rock stacked and frozen in a canyon wall or rings of a tree marking time; the design of the chair said look, I’ve been around, please remember I’m made of things that are not new and I’m proud.

Through Scrap Chair Grizzle and Junker expressed a concept found at the heart of Drop City’s show: materials have lives, and at the end of their lives they still have something to give physically, conceptually.  This idea is born from a gaze that focuses on a moment pre-recycling, the instant before we label something as trash and toss it.  A conscious shift in perspective that grants old materials new identities.  A creativity that renames.

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Erin Kendig is the Marketing Coordinator for ARCADE.  She likes things that are old and wants to illustrate a book someday.

tags: chairs, exhibitions, furniture, lights, recycled, scraps