It's ok, he has a great website where you can see a lot more of his work, and his unbelievable house!
But this is not (really) just another excuse to blog about art. His pieces range from functional furniture to whimsical new furniture(esque) forms. They interpret natural wood forms and furniture conventions to create something new, organic, and artistic. It struck me while I was in the exhibition that I was seeing, among many things, an antithesis of industrial processes and aesthetics.
It's art, so maybe that's not super surprising; but it's not just that this is handmade furniture, it's that it moves beyond deep conventions, it totally reimagines something -- furniture -- that we're used to seeing in factory-made and/or highly stylized form.
Industrially made utilitarian objects -- like, 99% of the stuff a lot of us interact with -- are standardized, designed to reflect convention, divorced from natural forms and properties, mass-produced. It's a pretty basic observation, but the contrast made an impression and led me to look again at the industrial 99%.
So, taking it one step forward: seeing things in a provocative new way? Bring it to more (industrial) history museums! How rad would it be to see Brooks' stuff in, like, the Grand Rapids Public Museum's Furniture City exhibit (Grand Rapids -- "the first center of mass-produced furniture in North America!") ? Or -- omg -- a historic house.
Compare Jon Brooks' Citron Altar...
 |
| Citron Altar, 2007. Jon Brooks. |
...With, say, this:
One of my favs from the exhibition:
Tons more on Flikr!
No comments:
Post a Comment