I employ the kinds of things I can control to pursue the things that elude me. –GP
The title 100, like most of Peteran’s titles, is quite literal. It was the one hundredth object that he managed to sell. The work consists of a pair of identical tables, one of which is normally displayed in a disassembled state, packed into a custom-built, leather-lined case. The parts of the two tables are interchangeable, the bronze and wood shaped to extraordinarily tight dimensional tolerances on equipment belonging to a friendly Toronto machinist. The metaphor of a gun leaps to mind, both because of the carrying case and the combination of dull black metal and polished wood. Perhaps when he made this highly conceptual piece, which marks a turning point in his career, Peteran was thinking of himself as a sniper—targeted and precise, camped on the edges of the furniture field and picking his spots. The title of the work also hints at another subject: mass production. These tables were manufactured through the investment of hours and hours of laborious set-up and calibration on expensive replicating tools, but there are only two of them. By concentrating the productive capacity required to make a hundred or a million objects into only a pair, Peteran perhaps hoped to create an experience of unusual intensity.
100, 1996
Machined bronze, ebony, custom-built oak and leather case
Lent by Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett
I employ the kinds of things I can control to pursue the things that elude me. –GP
The directive behind this piece was to try and capture the essence of furniture: to capture the history, structural substance, and poetry of the object in a more vital, gestural way. Standing in the neutral territory between the revered and the rejected, this table relies heavily on the individual’s recollection of furniture—specifically, the classical D-shaped or demilune tables—as well as their recollection of . . . junk. –GP