David R. Guenette

       ARCH ART

Illuminating Found Boxes 

Old wooden moving shipping crates, product cases, and a miscellany of other wood boxes form the starting points for the assemblages of this show, where what was once the discards of time and need past become the framework for new art work. 

All art is derived from the choices the artist must make, but the use of found frameworks—in this show’s instances, retrieved wooden boxes—supply more specific and restricting starting points than the traditional painter’s canvas frame or drawer’s sketch pad. Like other forms of sculpture, the art work with boxes as the starting point are three-dimensional, but add another aspect of light, which is the self-illuminating quality of integrated lighting fixtures that also reinforce the play of utility in these pieces: Art, or furniture? Lamps, or sculpture? 

Like a Robinson Crusoe washed upon the beach of our materialist desert island, I recycle old wood boxes, pieces from traditional furniture, and the found bits and pieces of our everyday lives to make assemblages that keep crossing and re-crossing the lines between sculpture and furniture. One of my interests is to highlight and appreciate the ephemera of our culture within extremely stylized yet useful home furnishings. 

The role of illumination is also Crusoe-like, writ ironic, with whiskey boxes (such as seen in “Go Figure, Forth, and Multiply,” 2003) forming both part of the lamp’s pedestal and a small illuminated inner space containing an odd, found-object type of decoration. In many ways, as in the larger world of consumerism run rampant, art had become simply another commodity; indeed, the new digital technologies both fulfill their promise to bring creative production to everyone and their threat to make art as interchangeable and commoditized as any other product in our world of mass production and global markets.

Whether the result of an anal-compulsive hatred of waste (along with its mirror state of love for waste, one might add!) or a Quixotic quest to reform what exists into something new, my work refuses the traditional media of art to recreate from an emergent medium of the Twentieth Century—found objects. Joseph Cornel, almost single-handedly (although with the efforts of the Dada-ists and Surrealists providing the cultural groundbreaking) propelled the acceptance of found objects as proper and exciting material for the creation of art. 

Examples of pieces relevant for inclusion:

Dramatis Personae: Comedy and Tragedy (2003)

The Shape of Things (2003)

Four Elements: Moving, Staying, Breathing, Dying (2003)

The Cabinet of Self (2003)

Go Figure, Forth, and Multiply (2003)

Identity Kit (2003)

Winter Comes a Drawer (2003) 

A qui est ce babiole monde? (2003)

Flip Box (2003)

Dream in a Box (2003)

Ephemeral Lamp (2002)

Father Hand (2002)

Memory Bank (2002)

Rich, Perfection, Projection, Reflection (2000)

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Image poems for the concrete world.  Copyright © David R. Guenette    guenette@comcast.net

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