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- Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker
Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker
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University of Toronto Art Centre
Tuesday September 8, 2009 to Saturday December 5, 2009
Opening Reception: September 15, 6
A major retrospective touring exhibition of work by alumnus and faculty member Gord Peteran
The University of Toronto Art Centre will be the only Canadian venue to mount Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker an important retrospective of contemporary Canadian artist Gord Peteran. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chipstone Foundation with generous support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation, the exhibition of twenty-two works has been shown at the Cranbrook Art Museum and Winterthur Museum among others, and will come to Toronto, its final venue, from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
Peteran has launched a boundary-crossing career opening up the category of furniture to an unprecedented range of psychological and conceptual content. He uses: fine cabinetry, found objects, assemblage and sculptural techniques to create a series of works that do not always function as furniture, that are quite distinct from craft and which are not quite classifiable as design. Equally, if attempting to view them as sculpture they do not perpetuate the figurative and commemorative connotations of the Western tradition of three-dimensional art, nor can they be plotted on the graph of Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” They constitute a completely sui-generis form of Conceptual art.
Niamh O’Laoghaire, Director of UTAC believes that the University of Toronto – Canada’s most research intensive institution – is an excellent venue for the exhibition because Peteran pushes the boundaries of what is physically possible in furniture, sculpture and art. More profoundly, he gnaws away at the basic premises of each of those classifications (furniture, sculpture, art), radically transforming our understanding of the categories themselves.
Peteran has stated: “I would certainly call the objects I make furniture or furnitural, because I expect them to talk about all of the factors related to causing the space between us and our architecture. Because of the close proximity the domestic objects we arrange within those spaces are charged with the symptoms of life.” And further: “Furniture is our first sculptural encounter, after the body of the mother and slightly before the interior spatial volumes of architecture. I believe our relationship with the furnitural form remains suspended between those early experiences.”
Peteran, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design became very well known as a producer of “studio furniture.” During the 1990s he received many important public commissions: the Boardroom door for the Ontario Crafts Council (1990); Clock for Toronto City Hall (1992); Musical Box for the Glenn Gould Foundation (1996). Despite attaining an extraordinary level of craftsmanship in the field of fine furniture he states that “virtuosity happens in the mind, not the hands. I think.” According to Glenn Adamson, the curator of Furniture Meets its Maker: “He has taken the category of furniture, or more precisely, that which he calls the “furnitural,” as a found object in its own right – a thing to be operated upon conceptually, while at the same time left in place.” While creating many objects from scratch, Peteran also aims for objects and processes that will, with minimal intervention, lead to the maximum shift – the most profound interrogation of the nature and meaning of the object or process inspected.
The award-winning catalogue accompanying the exhibition addresses key issues relevant to Peteran's work, the use of the found object, the role of narrative in furniture, and the relationship between serial and one-off production. The originality of the project lies in the fact that nothing substantive had previously been written on Peteran, and the form and content of the catalogue takes an unorthodox approach to include commentary from art critics and the furniture maker's psychoanalyst in fold-out pages, emphasising the dissonant stance toward functionality which characterizes the furniture.
Furniture Meets its Maker will be complemented by the smaller scale exhibition
Gord Peteran Recent Works. Curated by Matt Brower, this constellation of pieces will explore the body and the mentally prosthetic nature of our possessions. The show is supported by the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts.
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, and presented at UTAC with the support of Manulife Financial and Peter Allen, Lead Supporter of UTAC’s educational program, Art with Insight.
