For the body to function it needs vast amounts of resistance, as does the intellect. . . . The only comfortable place is in the grave. –GP
Ark is Peteran’s most complex and monumental work. The quarter-sawn red oak panels that make up the exterior project at unexpected angles, each with a slightly different configuration of slanted framing elements. Bronze rings top each corner, suggesting that the whole work is meant to be portable, perhaps through the agency of ceremonial bearers armed with long poles. The interior is luxuriously upholstered in plush, hand-tufted red velvet. The overall form brings to mind a bewildering variety of furniture-related precedents: a sedan chair, a confessional, a throne, a stagecoach, a psychiatrist’s couch, a specimen cabinet, a phone booth, and even an electric chair. The last association is particularly strong because of the mysterious black electrical cord that snakes away from the piece. When a person enters Ark and closes the door, an overhead light automatically illuminates. Suddenly the user is put on view, enclosed in a luxurious but airless chamber. When in use, Ark becomes a double-edged and many-layered metaphor that calls forth numerous oppositions: exhibitionism and privacy, coziness and claustrophobia, display and functionality, privilege and death.
100, 1996
Machined bronze, ebony, custom-built oak and leather case
Lent by Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett
I employ the kinds of things I can control to pursue the things that elude me. –GP
The directive behind this piece was to try and capture the essence of furniture: to capture the history, structural substance, and poetry of the object in a more vital, gestural way. Standing in the neutral territory between the revered and the rejected, this table relies heavily on the individual’s recollection of furniture—specifically, the classical D-shaped or demilune tables—as well as their recollection of . . . junk. –GP