Creations in wood, often as imaginatively wrought as sculpture, adorn city galleries.

By Edward J. Sozanski  | Art | Wonderful works of furniture

Inquirer ColumnistBravura displays of creativity realized through masterly craftsmanship - hand and brain working together to produce objects of surpassing beauty and delight - remain thrilling to behold in this computerized age.
Thanks to the Furniture Society's annual conference, held earlier this month at the University of the Arts, the city's galleries are full of such splendid objects.
The mix includes furniture that's primarily practical, some that's mainly sculptural, and even some sculpture that barely relates to furniture.
The various exhibitions include artists such as Michael Hurwitz who produce elegant studio furniture, others like Jack Larrimore and Wendell Castle who segue into sculpture enlivened by whimsical fantasy, and a group of artists and artisans who use a common furniture form, the cabinet, to obliterate the distinction between craft and art.
They work their marvels in wood, a notoriously unforgiving medium. Clay and glass permit mistakes up to a point, but the risks with wood are higher. A slip with a sharp tool or a sawcut slightly off-line can negate hours of patient labor.
This is one reason to admire a woodworker who completes a flawless object, be it a desk, a chest of drawers or even a simple side chair.
A piece from the hand represents something more than a place to sit or store socks and underwear. Like a painting or a print, it communicates a personal spirit and a personal aesthetic philosophy from maker to owner.
Inherent material beauty also makes wooden objects appealing. An artist doesn't need to do much to an intricately grained plank to make it sing. And today's furniture artisans have expanded their vocabulary exponentially with all sorts of exotic species.
For instance, Hurwitz's show at Temple Gallery includes several pieces in narra, an Indonesian hardwood I hadn't seen before. Its soft caramel color, similar to teak, imparts warmth, especially when used over broad surfaces.
Hurwitz is more conservative than some of his contemporaries. His distinctive touches, such as covering his Collector's Cabinet with resin-impregnated silk, resist flamboyancy. Latticed "fishnet" panels in a bed's headboard and footboard are about as flashy as he gets.
Hurwitz's forms tend to be understated, like the upright U-shape of Collector's Cabinet and the inverted U of Pine Forest Desk. He uses linear inlays of contrasting wood, but otherwise lets the materials speak forcefully.
The desk eloquently demonstrates the virtue of this strategy. It consists of only three elements, two side pieces and a top, all shaped as flattened ovals.
A flat writing surface is scooped out of the top, and is left natural; otherwise, the surface is finished in black lacquer (by Japanese master Yuji Kubo) in a mottled pattern that resembles silk brocade. It's modern, it's traditional, it's exquisite.
Castle and Larrimore work the sculptural side of the woodworking midway. Castle, an artist of international reputation for his major innovations in the field, has a show of recent work at Wexler Gallery.
His pieces are also included in Snyderman Gallery's 20th anniversary group show and in another group show of vintage studio furniture at Moderne Gallery.
The 10 examples at Wexler extend Castle's long-standing ambitions to be considered a sculptor. Several explore the idea of a rigid object - a stylized chair frame - interacting with a soft one, a pillow. Except that the illusionistic "pillows" are carved from wood.
These sculptures don't have much to say beyond the flash effect of fooling the eye. It's a neat trick, but it wears off in about five seconds.
By contrast, Castle's celebrated technical prowess is abundantly evident in Gorgeous Feast, an extravagant desk-and-chair set of fiberglass, leather and several woods. It's classic Castle, nominally functional but otherwise exuberantly over-the-top as a decorative object.
A Castle sideboard in walnut at Snyderman, a local pioneer in exhibiting studio furniture, is only slightly less exhibitionistic.
Castle often falls flat when he ventures into pure sculpture; as the "pillow-chairs" indicate, he doesn't have the requisite sensibility for it. Larrimore, showing at Schmidt Dean Gallery, handles the transition from function to fantasy more deftly and consistently.
Some of his 10 pieces, like a pair of side chairs with velvet cushions and two small tables of worm-eaten mahogany, certify him to be an innovative furniture-maker.
But his wild imagination carries him far beyond decoration or function. When it does, he produces sculptures that proclaim their pedigree without resorting to obvious references.
Larrimore's sculptures have spirit, often expressed as sinuosity or a sense of movement.
The one called Endure the Dark - an inverted cone with a tiny "tail" supported by six spindly legs - suggests an alien organism. It could be used as a table if it didn't look so menacing, like a prehistoric arthropod.
"Cabinets of Curiosities" at the Wood Turning Center sounds like a furniture show, but it's pure art, ironically from two sources grounded in practicality. It features 14 constructions that examine the concept proclaimed by the show title through collaborations between wood-turners and furniture-makers.
Today's wood-turners create a lot of fancy lathe acrobatics, but not much of that is evident in this show, the result of a juried competition sponsored by the center and the Furniture Society that drew 57 entries.
In fact, the turned bits are so sublimated in the various compositions that one is hardly aware of them. Furniture forms and techniques are more prevalent, but not to the point where they establish the mood either.
Instead, artisanship transmutes effortlessly into art. A historical model - cabinets used to store collections of "curiosities" - emerges in the show as 14 intriguing extrapolations of that idea.
Only a few pieces, most noticeably a small chest by Miguel Gomes-Ibañez whose drawer fronts are painted with alphabet letters by Joseph Reed, look like cabinets. The others, even those with not-so-obvious drawers or analogous compartments, look more like sculptures.
The companion "curiosities" are mostly invented. A real luna moth displayed in the pedestal sculpture Seven Wonders by Kurt Nielsen and Dan Essig is a prominent exception.
All the pieces play with the idea of finding and compartmentalizing unusual "treasures." For the viewer, discovery is an important part of the equation, especially in the foldup cabinet that Doug Haslam made to hold miniature "curiosities" devised by 16 Canadian artists.
The 14 highly disparate pieces conceal secrets of various kinds, some to do with their architecture and some with their contents. As such, they're enchanting metaphors for the human experience itself.
The exhibition proves conclusively that artisanship not only serves art, but can readily evolve into it when personalities and circumstances encourage the process.