We touch each other through objects, an intimate and nostalgic curiosity suggested through the playful double-entendre of the exhibition title. I have the privilege of sharing studio space with Norman Teague and have watched his objects evolve and morph. I also had a chance to visit Alex Chitty’s studio to observe some of what is emerging from her curious and spacious imagination.

It is remarkable that after all of these millennia of sitting down on things, we are still designing new things to sit on. You’d think maybe we could have nailed the design by now. But at this point in our evolution, functionality is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a thing to be called a chair. Except maybe for the original Chair that lives in the eternal mind of the creator, every one since has been a chair-ish derivative. This might explain something about our obsessions.

If I sit on a pumpkin or a water buffalo, I don’t call it a chair even though it might function as one. Yet even with a missing leg, a chair remains a chair even if we can’t sit on it anymore. So the whole spectrum between broken chair and water buffalo is “chair-ish.” Definitions are all a little -ish because they are based on something ephemeral. Mostly we get by with approximations. If I lean against a Volkswagen, it’s a little chair-ish, or if I perch on the edge of a radiator while I drink my morning coffee, chair-ish. But if I sit on a basket looking into the eyes of someone I care about as our hearts merge in a shared experience of meaning, cherish. The strength of the emotion drives the materiality of a moment into your bones. And sometimes the other way around. It’s not hard to imagine how the causal chain remains ambiguous. Emotion has a material reality while things harbor pathos.



You may encounter parts of chairs deconstructed, reconfigured and merged with other things, flattened and laid open, broken down, raised up, redeemed, contorted, never disgraced, but sad and longing. Despite their varying backgrounds and entry points, they embody a playful, nostalgic, hopeful, hungry, curious, antagonistic exploration of our relationship with a familiar and mundane form.