David R. Guenette

       ARCH ART

BOX: ART: FURNITURE 

Community Builders Cooperative (in conjunction with WAP/SAC, Somerville; Fall 2003)

The old enough cliché is that art is a frame, or box, that presents image or vision in a self-conscious intentional way. Like most well-worn aphorisms, it contains a good share of truth. Most people will say, I’m willing to wager, they’re happy to look inside a box, even when it’s little more than a walnut shell half perhaps covering a pea.

In my new series, 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 (I hope) cozy and useful home furnishings.

My poetry is also a part of the work, at least indirectly; for three decades now I’ve written poetry (although more often in the breach then observance), following themes of nostalgia and the efficacy of the particular image to invoke moral and aesthetic moments of our personal histories. The assemblages seem to me to be an extension of poetry in the both the pursuit of the select image and the process of selecting of image, too. 

As an editor for most of my professional life, I came to realize that my mindset is that of a counter-puncher, or puzzle-solver, reacting to choices placed before me and building a new structure from the pieces. Now my work takes place in the studio, and my art is made out of the material created in the headlong rush of materialism: recoveries from forgotten trunks, drawers, and boxes, gleanings of estates, flea markets, and tag sales, and the revealed and retrieved from streets, sidewalks, and trash piles. But there also remains an emphasis on the copious written and printed and reproduced record of personal and public lives, drawn from diaries, photographs, letters, books, documents, and magazines, to name only some. 

In the end, I hope, my work reflects puzzles of a larger sort, as an effort of wrestling with the most basic struggles in which we are all engaged: consumption versus conservation, paying attention versus being overwhelmed, mass commodity versus individuality, nostalgia versus presence, despair versus grace.

Dramatis Personae (2003): Comedy

Dramatis Personae (2003): Tragedy

The Shape of Things (2003)

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

The Cabinet of Self (2003)

 

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

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