At Your Service: Midcentury Muses
September 1, 2008
Cheryl Ekstrom remembers the moment she became an artist. She was 24, visiting a writer friend in Philadelphia, and seeing, for the first time, the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, that icon of midcentury architectural furniture released in 1956. "I stood frozen," she recalls. "It was so ‘otherworldly.’ It represented a different way of thinking."
Years later, after living in Belgium, after art school, after several years of living in Southern California, Ekstrom remembered that epiphany while competing to design public bus benches in Laguna Beach. Her proposal? To sculpt the Eames and other iconic midcentury designs: the George Nelson Marshmallow sofa, the Arne Jacobsen Swan chair, and two sizes of beanbag chairs.
Although she didn’t win the competition, she won the exclusive rights to cast and sculpt limited editions of these originals from the Eames estate as well as manufacturers Herman Miller and Fritz Hansen. What followed was Stable Inhabitants of a Changing World, Ekstrom’s series of stainless-steel sculptures. Limited to a run of five per design (after which the mold is broken), each piece takes up to five months to create, requiring over 300 hours of polishing alone. Paradoxically, the result both bridges and buttresses the divide between fine and functional arts.
"I wanted to freeze the design and take it back to its original message to me—art—and then to elevate it from its place of functionality," Ekstrom explains. "I want people to stop and see it as a cross between design, architecture, and art, and for it to have no function whatsoever."
Pieces weigh between 117 pounds (the small beanbag chair) and 260 pounds (the Eames chair, plus another 110 pounds for the ottoman), and range in price from $40,000 to $85,000.
Cheryl Ekstrom, www.cherylekstrom.com
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