Trash talk: Forsaken chairs find virtual home
August 6, 2010
Ellen Moorhouse
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Chairs are fascinating. In ancient times, they served as thrones, seats of status, and, let’s face it, they still convey hierarchy, like the arm chair at the head of the dining table or Archie Bunker’s wing chair.
By Renaissance times, chairs began to replace benches and stools as places to plant the commoner’s body, but it took those leaders of taste, the French, to raise the bar in the 18th century with stylish upholstered designs.
Of all our pieces of furniture, the chair is most affected by fashion in its shape, material and colour, and by our evolving lifestyles. Perhaps that’s why so many of them end up on the street as garbage.
Fortunately, photographer and post-production film supervisor Matt Cahill has taken notice. He has started a project, with cellphone photos, of orphaned chairs sitting curbside, waiting for liberation (reuse) or the executioner (the garbage truck). He calls his initiative “Conversations with Abandoned Chairs.”
“I’ve always liked to take something without disturbing it and frame it within a different context than people are used to seeing,” says Cahill.
Indoor chairs outside on a sidewalk certainly fit that bill.
The first chair encounter that stirred his imagination happened a year ago in the College and Borden Sts. area, where he saw an elegant little side chair, Louis XV-style, with a brocade seat and the top piece missing from its wooden back.
“It was just presenting itself to me, like you’d see a duck or something like that on the sidewalk. It was embued with so much charm,” says Cahill, who also writes fiction.
His first inclination was to save it, take it home, but, of course, it would have served no purpose. Then it struck him: take a cellphone photo. He posted it on his Facebook page and “people instantly gravitated to it.”
Once he had photographed the first chair, he began noticing others. A few friends began sending photos of specimens they found. Acquaintances, knowing his interest, would tell him about potential subjects. For example, he was recently leaving his post-production job (he’s working on Saw 3D, coming to a screen near you for Halloween) when a colleague told him of an unfortunate blue wing chair, its front legs splayed, nearby on Queen St. E.
Trying to distill the essence of a discarded chair isn’t always easy. Sometimes taking the best view, with juxtaposed garbage bins, would be life-threatening — from the middle of Spadina, for example. And it’s a challenge, he says, with a simple cellphone, to arrive at the composition that expresses what he wants to say, or rather “allows the chairs to tell their stories by how they’ve been discarded or what state they are when they’ve been discarded. You know, you could make the argument that the more well-worn chairs had fuller lives.”
The chair project, to which he has added sofas, is a sideline for Cahill. His main focus, as a photographer, with his 35mm Soviet Leica clone, are the city’s laneways and streetscapes with their interesting juxtapositions and collisions of materials. He did, however, honour his Sanyo cellphone, retired after nine years, by creating a triptych of images and words, which he called “Eulogy for a Dead Cell Phone.”
In Toronto, in this age of bed bug infestations, upholstered items are increasingly the new Trojan horse, harbouring tiny potential invaders, so chances are the snapshots taken by Cahill and his friends are also eulogies, the last bit of recognition these chairs receive.
He has posted the project, which he describes as not quite photojournalism and not quite art, on Flickr ( www.flickr.com, search Conversations with Abandoned Chairs). There we can contemplate these chairs, crafted to support us, even embrace us, now rejected for reasons of taste, maltreatment, old age or even space. Cahill lets us appreciate their quirky personalities and styles, and encourages us to ponder what their collective fate says about the way we live.
Send questions or comments to e_moorhouse@sympatico.ca.
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