Shannon Goff
March 10 - April 13, 2006
Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Chicago-based artist Shannon Goff. Goff creates monochromatic, over-scaled likenesses of domestic objects using traditional materials (e.g. porcelain, cardboard, clay, paper), which she modifies with industrial applications. She deftly combines the familiar iconography and technical certainties of industrial design with the eccentricities and spontaneity of craft techniques.
Pink Phone, 2005, for example, evokes the fashionable, pop color of the iconic 1960's "Princess" phone, though its form could best be described as a jumbo version of a pre-World War II desktop rotary phone. The telephone, once a fixed device that could only be used in the privacy of the office or home, has now become as public and mobile as any other hi-tech consumer accessory.
Goff's installation of five matching oversized phones in a variety of colors, posed on a long display table, enables us to approach these objects both as viewers and consumers. When confronted with the same object in an assortment of colors, our choices as viewers engage our consumer sensibilities. As with all of her work, Goff ponders the notion that an artist can separate an object from reality.
Goff's works, all of which as translated from the line drawings she initially creates, document the industrial design evolution of the telephone. They are executed using a highly sophisticated industrial system of porcelain mold making and glazing facilitated by Kohler Industries (Goff was a recent resident at the John Michael Kohler Art Center).
The seamless translation from one medium to another is at the core of this exhibition of sculpture and drawings. Using the telephone as metaphor, Goff repeatedly deals with issues revolving around the translation of ideas, whether drawing to form, studio to industry, or low culture to high culture. From her fashion-referential embrace of color and scale, to her humorously awkward homage to Modern design, Goff orients her role as an artist within a larger framework of mass-market culture.