Lessons in Objectology | Gord Peteran

Gord Peteran creates compelling and highly inventive artworks using materials, processes and vocabularies that intersect with furniture-making, sculpture, assemblage, craft and decorative and contemporary arts that are at once all and none of these. Many of his works are restored and transformed from existing objects that embody their own histories. While they may resemble chairs, tables, wall hangings or other forms of domesticity, these are not functional in ways we would expect. Nor do they share aesthetic affinity with much conventional sculpture. Some works contain drawers and secret compartments that house objects such as weapons, musical instruments and various gadgets, evoking an iconography rich in symbolic, metaphorical and poetic resonance. Recurring objects such as guns and halos, for example, might suggest the human capacities for cruelty and kindness. The work is characterized by playful juxtapositions between the strange and the familiar, the benign and the sinister, the humourous and the absurd. These apparent contradictions generate an uneasy tension and uncertainty that confound our instinctive attempts to classify and define our surroundings. A friction or gap emerges in our search for meaning and understanding – a charged realm within the viewer that attunes our awareness to our relationships with objects and the built environment.

We furnish our lives through an ongoing process of collecting, discarding and arranging objects and possessions. Our possessions define us as they reflect the social constructs and frameworks embedded within them. Detached from their original functions and contexts, objects can acquire an often-overlooked psychological current that runs beneath the seemingly mundane material surfaces of the worlds we build for ourselves. Through the exhibition Lessons in Objectology, Gord Peteran invites viewers to consider the strange, symbolic and sometimes unsettling relationships we form with the things that surround us.
Nothing is above the suspicion of our curiosity.

David Liss, exhibition curator