Mónica de la Torre
Never decorative, it embodies a chair’s provisional character. Utilitarian, never just there, called upon to serve. Communal, egalitarian, leveling its occupants, gathered for an occasion. Rarely will it hold the sitter captive. Its precariousness invites walkouts, even when the seat is secured by an admittance fee. Repositionable, it favors assorted geometries of attention: the frontal and single-focused, the shifting and radial. Irreverent, whether in an institutional setting or not, signaling reversible orders. Possibly carnivalesque, displaying an upside-down world, as in:
a projection of the high-desert landscape and transit
surrounding an old ice plant in the desert
requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room;
ironically inverted in this picture of a tiny fraction of the
planet—
with no search engine logo and copyright date camouflaged
to appear like a wisp of a stratus cloud—
is the electrical plant across the street grids reversed, as is the soundtrack, extemporaneously
produced
by the cars and pickup trucks seen fleeting by from east to
west though by the sound we know they’re going west
to east, and vice versa;
a projection within a projection these are moving images to experience, but not keep.
Unsung, stacked, piled against a wall, or hidden in closets, folding chairs will be counted on again since, plastic palace people, they’re both transience and ritual. Welcome into the fold. Who cares what the future brings.
Excerpted from The Happy End / All Welcome, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017