Biography
In his sculptures, installations, and site-specific interventions, Chadwick Rantanen brings together opposites into not-quite-harmonious wholes. He works with industrially produced, utilitarian materials like mugs, hospital scrubs, plastic bins, fluorescent lights, and tennis balls, altering and assembling them into works of art. Through such work, he playfully highlights the tension between the mass-produced and the handmade, industry and art, and function and decoration. He has created chandelier-like clusters of ceramic mugs held together with aluminum clamps, and crafted floor-to-ceiling installations out of colored aluminum poles affixed at both ends with the tennis balls commonly used to make walkers easier to push across the floor. For one of his subtler interventions into a gallery’s space, he simply detached one end of a selection of its fluorescent light fixtures so that they dangled from their wires—forming surprisingly elegant, triangular ceiling sculptures.