Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro Future Furnishings April 29- June, 2011 Nature Morte Berlin Zimmer Strasse 90-91 Berlin 10117, DE by craniv boyd.
To look forward one may have to throw a glance backward in the past might be a motto for Australian born artist duo Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy’s current exhibition titled Future Furnishings at Berlin located Gallery, Nature Morte. Another possible motto for the exhibition could be Darwin Meets Funkis and hits it off. Reason for Darwin and Swedish modern Architecture or industrial design coming together in the picture which Healy & Cordeiro create through their installations and sculptures being that there are scaled Dinosaur skeletons bound to ad-hoc unconventional pedestals of home furnishings for Ikea, as well as a Future Fossil.
Future Furnishings collapses time in a postmodern additive way that locates Dinosaur fossil replica plus self assemble middle class urbanite home furnishings in a function for adroit social commentary. Future Remnant, and Future Remnant (chip) in the first and third rooms of Nature Morte’s gallery space are the two most physically present and as a result confrontational of the objects. The totality of extinct Jurassic or Triassic creatures, observing their bone structure that once carried flesh subjected to other atmospheric pressure, housed lungs that breathed air with a different chemical ratio than what we as Homo Sapiens currently breathe, conflated with an over abundance of smaller sized multi colored relatively commonplace Ikea products, which support the plastic fossils bring home to bear the more transient aspects of human or lived existence. Contemplating old bones with current utilitarian design objects cast quite literally in supporting role in the practice of contemporary art we have old found materials that are recent finds (18th century onwards via Naturalism movement) and new found materials that are in fact recent purchases (via Ikea and their thinly veiled patriotic publicity campaign casting “affordable” things for the home with nonsensical Swedish looking names and color branding schema that is deliberately the same as the Kingdoms Flag). These elements work in concert the multi colored pedestals as a kind of Donald Judd Swiss boxes out of found materials and the faithfully fake fossils as a memento mori, reminder of death for us modern people who do not ascribe to the belief in Creationism. People who hold that evolutionary theory propounded by C. Darwin is not total bunk.
Pulverization as a verb for art firmly locates the tri part serial sculpture Dust to Dust, in room two of the Gallery (Michelangelo’s David as pulverized Carerra white marble?) in the contemporary canon. The inclusion of the words “entire… coffee table” in the list of works contributes a subtext and explanatory meaning to the sculptures that are glass vitrines on wooden stilts at slightly above navel level that contain neatly formed half spheres of what looks like saw dust and paint chips. The information of origins from whence this neatly formed dust came is culled from the afore mentioned guide that concisely provides conceptual background in support of un-confirmable retinal based supposition, from the looks of Dust to Dust alone it is perhaps central to understanding the import of the work, to pay a glance at the A4 with the “check list” not so for the Future Remnant’s, the more visually striking of the exhibition.
By craniv boyd