Future Furnishings | Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Future Furnishings
Forming the centerpiece of the installation, a tectonic, cable-bound heap of neatly stacked IKEA furniture props up the enormous fossil of a Monolophosaurus dinosaur. Accompanying the sculpture are drawings illustrating the construction of a dinosaur in the style of IKEA’s pictorial instruction manuals. The artists say of their work:"This mighty dinosaur will … highlight the contemporary disposable, mass-produced against an historical artifact: the uncertain present and future versus the known past… The work juxtaposes our keen understanding of where we fit into the past and our myopic vision of where we want to be in the future."
Conflating time, scale, and space, Healy and Cordeiro’s works are often minimalist-inflected revelations about the simple trajectory of things over time. Like archeological revisionists, they pit the transient human life against its spectral, inorganic remnants. Themes of dislocation and the notion of home or inhabited space pervade their work. In the past, the pair have deconstructed houses, trailers and other human dwellings, and transformed them into surprisingly economic structures, or gathered the banal materials of quotidian life into awe-inspiring masses that represent symbolic periods of elapsed time.