DAVID BASKIN: UNTITLED
Image: David Baskin, Untitled, cast urethane rubber / ©David Baskin ©Black & White Gallery/Project Space
PRESS RELEASE / SUMMER 2003
A co-founder of the Brooklyn's Smack Mellon Studios, David Baskin began working with domestic furniture in an exhibition at the non-profit space. Working with objects from his recently deceased grandparent's home in Queens, the artist set out to illustrate how familiar—and in this case very personal—objects become curiosities when placed in the gallery by suspending the furniture from the ceiling, recreating the original configuration of the room in the air. He went on to cast the furniture in different materials for several other projects in a body of work culminated with the installation at Black & White Gallery. Made from cast resin, brightly colored fragments of the familiar objects protruded from the right and left walls of the outdoor space. Constructed to look as if the furniture was either emerging or receding from the gray cinder block, the installation resembled an archaeological site where ordinary objects had been half excavated from the walls. The back of a chair protruded outward, the skeletal outline of an armoire peeked through a wall, and other partially buried objects revealed themselves, softening the imposing concrete space. "The outdoor part of the gallery is daunting because of the austere urbanism of it—the light and the stark block—but the thought was to use these furniture elements to not necessarily recreate a domestic space, but reference it in a way that lets one identify with the familiar scale of the objects," said Baskin.