CHAIRS BEYOND RIGHT & WRONG – CURATED BY RAQUEL CAYRE

Featuring: Adam McEwen, Al Freeman, Alex Israel, Bunny Rogers, Chris Wolston, Cory Arcangel, Dana Barnes, Daniel Arsham, Darren Bader, Ely Fink and Todd Reime, Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, Green River Project LLC, Heji Shin, Jim Lambie, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, Jordan Wolfson, Jorge Pardo, Josh Sperling, Joyce Lin, Katherine Bernhardt, Katie Stout, KAWS and Estudio Campana, Lucy Dodd, Margaret Lee and Emily Sundblad, Mathias Bengtsson, Mario Navarro, Martine Syms, Martino Gamper, Mary Heilmann, Misha Kahn, Nate Lowman, Nicole Wermers, Paola Pivi, Peter Shire, Reginald Sylvester II, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rob Pruitt, Rogan Gregory, Sam Stewart, Serban Ionescu, Seth Price, The Haas Brothers, Thomas Barger, Tom Burr, Trisha Baga, Urs Fischer, Wade Guyton

This September, R & Company presents “Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong,” an exhibition curated by Raquel Cayre to re-think the chair and its corresponding forms of use and design. Featuring nearly 50 international artists and designers, the exhibition surveys the chair as a formal object, a product, a structure, a symbol and a material. Participants are invited to explore how these ideas contribute to an expanded notion of the chair as an archetype for creative work, while challenging the categorical divisions that extend between art and design. Some works were newly-produced for the exhibition, while others were curated specifically for their ability to contour away from pre-existing notions of form and function.

The title is a reference to the work of Seth Price, whose interdisciplinary use of diffusion, manipulation and narrative channel into strategies and arrangements found in the exhibition. “All interesting, all interlocking,” the exhibition, like the chair itself is always “something new, something else, something something.”*

Taking place on both upper and lower levels of the 64 White Street gallery, “Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong” encompasses a wide spectrum of practices and approaches that reflect the curator’s interest in the exhibition format and the chair’s unique ability to refract its potential meanings. “Chairs no longer gravitate toward a table;” Cayre states, “they take on their own meaning, and, like a game of musical chairs, offer a metaphor for position, arrangement, variation, distribution and recombination… A chair is always more than a chair.”

*Seth Price, How to Disappear in America (New York: Leopard Press, 2008).