Patterning Particularity: Adrienne Spier’s Furniture Sculptures

Adrienne Spier has had a long-standing fascination with flattening used furniture, taking away its ability to stand. She often begins her projects by scouring curbsides, classified ads, and waste facilities for desks, chairs and dressers — unwanted and outmoded, though often still perfectly functional. She dismantles, cuts, and reconfigures these items, translating their volumes into surface. In Waiting Rooms and Offices (Gallery Dare-Dare, Montréal, 2003) Spier elegantly evoked an office space using only two desks, levelled to the floor to form a single “H” shape — front, back, and sides splayed out as if the desks had been placed back to back before they were flattened. Once volumetric and functional, the flattened desks became pattern-like, as if to retroactively designate a template for their own construction. Deflated and stripped of their former use-value, they blended into the hardwood floor, taking on the weightiness of their architectural frame. Yet they also recalled the lightness of flattened cardboard boxes ready to be taped into temporary containers. Spier’s office space suspended viewers between several economies of the flat: the utilitarian flatness of floors and workstations, the pragmatic flatness of shipping for at-home assembly, the discursive flatness of paperwork, patterning, and diagrams of social space. 

In Unwanted, Broken and Useless (YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, 2006) a desk lay gutted and splayed on the floor. Its joins had been refashioned into joints; its drawers sutured shut and cut off, transformed into mere surfaces; its legs fitted with casters; its four corners attached to a pulley system, counterbalanced by clunky weights made from chunks of an antique stereo. When two people pushed on the counterweights, they raised the flattened desk into its upright position. A surprising gestural vocabulary emerged; the desk heaved, wobbled, and undulated, passing through myriad animal-like motions — rippling manta ray, scuttling sea star, teetering fawn. When it returned to the floor it acted as bellows, expelling a little puff of air. Playing with turning surface into volume, visitors mapped themselves into a comical, yet disturbing, animistic rite through which the desk came “alive,” re-inscribing its commodity fetishism with an uncanny creature-like quality. The piece re-imagined sculpture’s potential for anthropomorphic “presence” as a visceral desire to breathe life into commonplace objects — a desire played out in an absurd marionette dance that showcased the puppet masters as much as the puppet.