Micheal Samuels is a transformer. He transforms banal household furniture into something quite brilliant and rather beautiful – if those are appropriate words for furniture. When you see these sculptures you will see what I mean. These photos do not do them justice.
He trains our eye to appreciate the mish-mash of kitsch melamine (plastic-tabletop) patterns mainly from 50’s diner style furniture, the type that would be in Mrs. Cunningham’s kitchen (from Happy Days fame), combined with LED lights, 80’s desk lamps and G-clamps.
It is an odd selection of objects, but they are not random bunch of gear thrown together. You can see it is a very careful and thought-out process, selecting only pastel reds, oranges, yellow, greens and blues, and cutting and shaping the objects so they are completely re-constructed into whole sculptures from the various separate parts.
It makes you feel like you are in a parallel universe where kitchen and desk apparatus are the art works and marble sculptures should be used to store cans of beans.
He does things like cuts the middle part of a table top into very thin strips, then raises the strips into a perfect semi circle and puts a blue LED light underneath so it shines through. With these sculptures, the more you look the more you find bits in the furniture that he has worked on, bits he has cut out and reinserted in a different form or shape.
There is a direct link to the ‘Deconstructivists’ as they could be labelled, from the 80’s like Tony Cragg and his washing up bottles. Or Bill Woodrow’s guitar cut out from a washing machine.
Samuels’ sculpture also harks back to good old Kurt Schwitters –although Schwitters’ selection process consisted of bringing home rubbish he found on the street, much to his wife’s dismay!
It is refreshing to see that this type of art is still alive and progressing, years after the YBA’s saturated the British market with their brash and egotistical art and had seemed to obliterate the gentler and more outward looking instillations such as this. Everyone can appreciate Samuels’ art.
See examples of the Deconstructivists :
Bill Woodrow – Twin-Tub with Guitar 1981
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=16465&searchid=10985
Tony Cragg – Britain Seen from the North 1981
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=2918&searchid=16207
2 Comments
June 6, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Thank you so much! I really love yours too, I think I will be planning my weekend around your sleuthing.
I’m going to make my way to the Rokeby tomorrow, I’ll let you know what I think.
Eleanor.
June 6, 2008 at 2:47 pm
His work reminds me somewhat of Jessica Stockholder’s. I am dying to see this!