Excerpts from

Furniture: Six Perspectives by Gloria Hickey

Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

January 18-February 6, 1986

"...The result is Furniture: Six Perspectives, an exhibition solidly built on half a dozen major pieces. It offers viewers the opportunity to enter the six different very personal worlds of ceramic artists Aleksandor Sorotschynski and Katherine Zsolt, furniture designer Doug Stone, sculptors Peter Lieberman and Michael Robertson, then creator of found object instructions Roger Wood. One of the more officially furniture makers in the functional or any other sense, but all of them excepted curator Leo Kamen's invitation to ' do something with furniture'. The result is an exhibition that talks about furniture: its ability to create environment significance of its function, and its capacity to express humor and vitality. Zsolt refers to herself as a sculptor. She's known for her large corporate commissions, large scale ceramic murals. It is her job to unite the given elements of a lobby with the more intangible requirements of the corporate sponsor into a cohesive visual character. This informative and hard-working stuff is called decorative. And it is this perspective that she brings to her 'Waterfall Shower'. In Zsolt's own words, 'Waterfall Shower' 'was born from a need for a place of calm and privacy, a washroom satisfies more than just the primary functional prerequisites of the bathroom'. The installation clearly fulfills this criterion with the usual functional details couched in strong and appropriate formal terms. Privacy is accomplished by the shower stall niche, tranquility by the use of soothing sea green and turquoise tiles, and aesthetic unity by the dominance of the water metaphor throughout, including clay suds gathering at the white tubs claw feet." "... The show as a whole has visual impact in the kind of logical harmony due to its proportions even though there is no overlap in the artists' style. In other words Zsolt's large dreamy piece is brought into focus by Robertson's tight work, and the serious intent of Stone and Lieberman is balanced by the relief of humor and exuberance in Sorotschynski and Wood's work.

Where successful, exhibitions such as Virtu and Seduced and Abandon have made it clear that furniture can be sophisticated and inventive. What's Six Perspectives reminds us is how human furniture is - how it fulfills our need for such disparate things as humor and privacy. It expresses our idiosyncracies and describes our world. Even the purely sculptural work brings us back to the starting point: furniture is what we make it."

Gloria Hickey is a Toronto based free-lance writer on the arts.