Gord Peteran: Recent Works

University of Toronto Art Centre, 15 Kings College Circle, Toronto

September 8–December 5, 2009

Sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts

Gord Peteran Recent Works presents a linked series of works produced since the launch of Furniture Meets its Maker in 2006. Together, the pieces in the show address the body and the mentally prosthetic nature of our possessions. As renovations of found objects and ideas, the objects in the exhibition aesthetically take on a quality of déjà vu; letting us see for the first time things we’ve already seen without noticing.

Peteran’s exploration of what he calls the space of the furnitural, situated between the aesthetic and the useful, explicitly engages with the limits of human embodiment. Peteran’s practice not only comments on and deconstructs the cultural conceptions and historical contexts of furniture, it also continues to function as furniture. In the works’ working we find a material object lesson about the limits and possibilities of embodiment and thus, the human.