30 SEP YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS, 1930PM

Today, ID1 class went on a field trip to see the 100 Days, 100 Chairs exhibit at the Yerba Buena Gardens. An artist spent around three months taking garbage fare and transforming it into items of novelty, beauty, and intrigue. The concept of literally deconstructing the chair and making one anew intrigued me, especially now that I am in Furniture design.

What is a chair?

Modernists confront themselves with “essences” of things in an attempt to remove obfuscating aesthetics, focusing on what they believe is true. Our postmodern society likes to say it is retrospective one by looking at the past in a fair and sympathetic way, but at the same time indiscriminately noting the ups and downs of our ways, how we sometimes even with the best of intentions blind ourselves with assumptions.

I am reminded of my Introduction to Industrial Design class; we were tasked with the creation of a cardboard structure that will support a human body off the ground. Most classmates interpreted that as build a cardboard chair.



What is a chair?

Perhaps I will find out once I take the chair class in furniture.

There was another exhibit at the Yerba Buena Gardens: art made by inmates while incarcerated in prisons. Within simple display cases were the results of being stuck in the same room for most of the day. crude shivs and weapons gave way to soap dolls, false-bottomed cans, handmade mirrors, and even a picture frame made from weaved potato chip bags. It just goes to show that with limited resources and an infinite amount of time, creativity will result. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.