"Each year amid the chaos and carnage of life, I like to restore an old piece. It's an enjoyable process that provides a certain kind of form and technique investigation I thrive on. I feel like I have saved something, brought it back into service from the past.
This rather average example of a mid-19th century ladder-back, Shaker style chair was far beyond salvation. The feet had been cut down to the point that the bottom back two dowel joints were ruined, the back right leg was split to rat shit, the seat (out of which a dead mouse fell on to my studio floor upon arrival) was long gone, and every joint was loose beyond repair, normally falling within the category of 'not worth it.'
I set myself the challenge of 'restoring' my neglected, forlorn little friend. The wooden structure was fitted with metal braces wherever necessary while at the same time causing the required surface at 24" above grade. This prosthetic made from bits and pieces of brass I had around the shop does not enter the flesh of the patient and is fully reversible if necessary. The chair is now completely rigid while the brace is attached, the stool's surface is attained, although rather desperately, while feeding on the substructure of the ladder back chair."
Peteran's grandfather was an amateur cabinetmaker, who at one point made orthopedic devices for patients at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. This biographical detail raises the possibility that Prosthetic might be a self-portrait. This is not an obvious reading; the most evident subject matter of the work is restoration. Instead of upholstery, Peteran gives us "upholdstery," a reversible solution that preserves an historical artifact while giving it a new lease on life. But if Peteran's line of work has to do with maintaining furniture in its moment of demise, then Prosthetic certainly comes across as a signature object.
What Peteran has actually made, in formal terms, is entirely compensatory. The asymmetrical brass construct that grapples the found, broken chair is itself a diagnostic expression of the "patient's" precise injuries. Lateral and vertical forces are exerted where necessary, tightened rings bind splitting wood together, and the shattered rush seat is echoed by a cobbled-together brass circle that floats above it, slightly off-center. Prosthetic is, then, an analytic and reactive object. The chair's weak points are specified and addressed in a manner that seems simultaneously sensitive and hostile. Each interaction between brass and wood is lovingly crafted, but also a point of attack. So much could be said for Peteran's work in general. Taken as a whole, his oeuvre could be said to be a prosthetic applied to the category of furniture: life-support for a patient who may not make it in the punishing domain of contemporary post-conceptual art. As in the nursing home, the right thing to do is to see how much life can be reclaimed from that which is old and worn. Peteran can't make furniture (or the ideas that are proper to it) young again. But in propping up this medium through one act of desperation after another, he has made it seem a newly viable enterprise, after all and in spite of itself.
Note
This is an excerpt from Glenn Adamson Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets Its Maker (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum/University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). With contributions by David Dorenbaum and Gary Michael Dault.
