All hail the humble chair! It supports us when we’re tired, it coaxes us into better alignment, or more often, assists us in slumping, splaying, lounging and hunching. At its best moments, it organizes us in space. The chair is both form and function — the ultimate artists’ muse.
And so it makes sense, during this week of FOG Design+Art, the Fort Mason fair of couches and paintings, that not one, but two shows would open with a focus on alternative, artistic seating. Chair+ at 1599fdT and Enthroned at Jessica Silverman are within blocks of each other in San Francisco’s Chinatown, perfectly situated to provide a survey of sleek and scrappy approaches to this furniture staple.
At 1599fdT, the former Union Cleaners on Kearny Street, Chair + fills the long and narrow space with 13 chairs, all made by local artists, many evincing a lived-with quality that comes from reclaimed materials. Just inside the door is Isabella Manfredi’s Rest, shaped from redwood that was once part of a barn on her family’s Humboldt County property. In a nod, perhaps, to the Shaker practice of hanging chairs on wall-mounted peg rails, Manfredi’s Rest is topped with a carved coat hanger.
Wood appears in multiple chairs — as a collage element in Jesse Schlesinger’s Ad hoc Chair 01, as a painting substrate in Jonathan Runcio’s child-sized LR and MR, and under enamel in Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s Cube. In Rae Godin’s hands, the material becomes less warm and more antagonistic: plywood sprouts spikes.
The chairs of Chair + are appropriately extra. Extra formal (Matt Borruso’s Support), extra plush (Kristie Hansen’s Rust), extra flammable (David Ireland’s Peat Oven). They push back against their presumed roles to become artworks in their own right. Because even “ordinary” chairs push back against the bodies that perch upon them, as captured in Paul Kos’ life-sized photograph Emboss.
