EDITION INFORMATION

Chairs, with help from our emotions and imaginations, convey personalities. By both design and circumstance they can look cheerful, jaunty, or sorrowful. High backed office chairs sit up with purpose, while green plastic lawn chairs lay back a bit as if it were always a lazy summer Saturday.

These chairs have all sorts of personalities and as such mirror the history of the quirky non-profit arts center they call home. They're an odd lot, much like the multitudes that have passed through "The Workshop" over its long existence. But each one has a place in the institution's history. In them, I see stories across time.

Heidegger's thoughts on existence and time were big inspirations for this project, but this drug-addled dialogue from the silly comedy "Knocked Up" sums up just as well why I photographed every chair at the Visual Studies Workshop:

Pete: "There are five different types of chairs in this hotel room."
Ben: "Holy fuck. What are they all doing in here?"
Pete: "These are five different types of chairs."
Ben: "Get them out of here, man. This is too many chairs for one room."
Pete: "There's a guy that works for this hotel. His whole job is to find chairs. Look at this one. Look at it. It's gold and red, and it's kind of shiny. Shiny thread? Unbelievable. It is beautiful and it feels amazing."
Ben: "The tall one's gawking at me and the short one's being very droll. I don't like them."
Pete: "Oh, wow."
Ben: "It's weird that chairs even exist when you're not sitting on them."
. . . . . . .
The complete project can be seen on flickr.