Very Comfortable
A collaboration with Heidi Kayser at the Boehm Gallery, Palomar College, San Marcos CA
From surfing to potatoes to fornication, food and libation, the couch see’s it all and we see it all from the couch. No other piece of furniture in our domestic landscape takes more conscious use and abuse. The couch has had the unenviable task of shouldering the weight of America’s increasing girth. For most couches the design has been reduced from a once elegant flow of graceful material, exquisitely carved wood and prominent display in a parlor or a sitting room, to shapeless, lumpy, sectional, blobs seemingly bolted to the floor in front of a widescreen tv.
We buy couches by the truckload and after a few years of dutiful service, holding our bodies while our minds travel the universe seeking “reality” and fantastical thrills, we throw them to the curb to fend for themselves. These forlorn structures that once swaddled our bodies in both sickness and health are reduced to “bring a truck and take it away”. A quick stroll through Craig’s List Free and you’ll see the amazing wealth and gluttony of our disposable culture.
For this exhibition we seek to deconstruct the modern couch, separating the structure from the skin and the fat, creating a landscape of hobbled together, stapled, wood forms, rusted springs, worn fabric and bulky fillings of cotton and polyethylene foams. Lost pocket detritus including the occasional quarter, hairpin, eye brow plucker or cotton swab will regain their found status and be displayed as works of art. Patterns of worn fabric representing the skin shorn from the couches will adorn the walls as emblems of our intimate relationship with the reclining settee.