John Cederquist
April 15 - June 7, 2003
In his seventh solo exhibition in this gallery, Furniture That Builds Itself, John Cederquist faces off images of de-construction with busy cartoon hand images in the midst of re-construction.
Invoking perception as a consummate theme over the past decade, Cederquist has examined subjects ranging from historical western furniture to Popeye cartoons, to 17th Century Japanese kosade to 19th Century Japanese prints. Throughout these works, realistic renditions of haphazardly opened wood crates and randomly broken planks serve to literally provide a frame of reference and sense of scale for his transported imagery. In this series, Cederquist takes that thematic format to its next logical stage of progression – the creative process itself.
Here Cederquist revisits images that have cropped up in his work throughout the past fifteen years. The Missing Finial of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's Townsend Chest (initially referred to in Le Flueron Manquant, 1989) can be found in the chair entitled, The Finial That Found Itself, 2002. The bending paintbrush in Strokes of Genius, 1994 is actively engaged in Collaboration With Roy, 2002. And also Olive Oil's two right feet from his early leather sculpture entitled Olive's Shoes, 1988 are given a two-dimensional dancing partner in Flat Foot Floogie Builds A Bench, 2003.
Wielding a variety of hand tools, cartoon-like three fingered hands attached to long swooping black arms assert their presence within images of haphazard crates, dancing planks and appropriated Hiroshige waves. In Hydroplaning in Japan with the Stanley Brothers, a series of these hands pushing wood planes, seem to actively peel away the chest's fictitious façade to make way for its irrepressible interior. By depicting both motion and containment within the same object, Cederquist further engages the conflict of two-dimensional versus three-dimensional rendition. Here he provides us with the hope of finding visual pleasures within a confluence of dimensions and seduces us into momentarily abandoning what we "know" to be true in favor of believing what "appears" to be true.