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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > April > 07 > Entry
Sometimes a chair is not just a chair
Depending on your take, Roy McMakin is an artist who makes furniture or a designer who makes sculpture. His installations of found furniture led years ago the Seattle-based creator to make functional furniture and, ultimately architecture through his company, Domestic Furniture & Domestic Architecture.
Whatever McMakin makes beguiles whether its functional furniture or art objects. For “In and On” — an exhibit now on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery — McMakin created four art works that painstakingly and seamlessly fuse elements of sculpture and furniture.
McMakin is a minimalist, and a modernist too. And he pays reverence to both aesthetics in “My Slatback Chair with a Pair of Attached Chairs.” Vintage mid-century modern unit seating — the kind of connected vinyl-upholstered seats you’d find in an airport scene on “Mad Men” — conjoins with a slatback chair McMakin’s fashioned from maple and painted bright white. McMakin’s sleek handcrafted chair nuzzles with the slightly worn design object that inspired it.
In McMakin’s hands, a chair literally embodies the chairs that came before it.
The exhibit continues through May 15. Lora Reynolds Gallery, 360 Nueces St. www.lorareynolds.com
Image: Roy McMakin, ‘My Slatback Chair with a pair of Attached Chairs,’ 2010. Found chair and enamel paint on maple. Courtesy Lora Reynolds Gallery.
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