. Sept 09–Oct 10 . 2010

Michael Zelehoski

Objecthood

Michael Zelehoski: Objecthood

Each epoch always has and always needs its oppositions of destruction and construction.1 -Piet Mondrian

A chair—an old wooden chair made of four legs, seat and backrest. This chair appears conventionally arranged—top, lower and seat rails for frame; a central, upright panel as backrest; stretchers and legs technically joined with ‘through tenons.’ Misshapen and incomplete elements are present to the viewer over time and closer analysis. The seat’s surface, typically modified to a person’s ergonomic contour, lies irregular and disjointed; the seat’s rails misalign. Typically grounded, the chair suspends on the wall at level or above the viewer’s horizon and bodily schema. Compressed and foreshortened, the object reconfig-ures into an ambiguous, deformed planar object or artifact. The chair’s perspective is newly synthesized, yet the viewer successfully maintains the perceptual experience of a chair.

Zelehoski’s sculpture, Chair (2010), is a mixed media assemblage composed of a deconstructed chair and plywood. His series of flat sculptures on exhibit in Objecthood have familiar and utilitarian titles, such as Box, White Table, Horses, Ladders, Pallet and Blue Shelves. The artist’s vernacular and found objects directly engage the domestic and urban environment, and introduce a significant discussion on the na-ture of relationships among the viewer, the object and the body. The sculpture Chair magnifies the intimate anatomy of this functional ob-ject and how it conforms ideally to human proportions. By introducing the formal, dialectical problem of the planar and geometrical surface, the artist expands upon a complex narrative of modern sculpture in the twentieth-century.

Zelehoski initiates a playful dialogue with earlier artistic examples of constructions and assemblages, including Picasso’s Cubist collages, Duchamp’s Readymades, and Rauschenberg’s Combines. While Zele-hoski might not allude, intentionally, to the ironical underpinnings of these earlier artworks, there remains a degree of play and conflict in the reconciliation of his objects’ destruction and reconstruction.² This conflict or act of transformation is a critical component of the artistic process. Its expression is found in Zelehoski’s denial of an object’s origi-nal, three-dimensional structure, and his subsequent establishment of the object’s authenticity as both concrete and abstract. In effect, the artist considers the history of the object itself as a primary element in the contemporary experience of his sculpture.

Box, 2010, 26 x 38”

Zelehoski’s large work, Picnic Table (2010), a commonplace park fixture, advances the question of the object’s inherent meaning. The painted-wood table and benches, as seen from below, assume a network of lin-tels and supports; surface elements advance and recede to reveal the table’s construction and “anti-structure.”³ The artist refers to the ob-ject’s concealed parts—the ulterior and unexposed matter—as its “un-dressed” elements.⁴ Central to Zelehoski’s approach are Maurice Mer-leau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on perceptual experience. His structures elicit an exhaustive and infinite totality of “perspectival views which blend with one another.”⁵ Primary and preformed objects, critically reconstructed by Zelehoski in Picnic Table and Chair, among other works, actively organize our perceptual knowledge. Through our spatial and corporeal relationship to them as objects, we enact this “pri-mary spatiality” or fundamental exchange in the world.⁶ Like Merleau-Ponty, Zelehoski attributes our perceived reality or consciousness to an exchange of relations between presences and absences, perceptible and non-visible matter.⁷

All works: found object assemblage

Picnic Table, 2010, 49 x 72”

Zelehoski’s exhibition title, Objecthood, also reframes the problem of spatial illusionism and postmodern sculpture. Handcrafted, wood con-structions—framed and supported on a wall—clearly depart from Mini-malism’s prefabricated, industrial sculptures from the 1960s and early 1970s.⁸ Yet Zelehoski’s geometric and modular objects, such as Ladders (2010), create an inevitable dialogue with, for example, Don-ald Judd’s galvanized, cantilevered metal boxes. While acknowledging Minimalism’s concern over the relational nature of compositional parts to cohere as a whole—the gestalt—Ladders disrupts the modular entity through its own spatial embodiment: adjacent, vertical ladders, each in part inert and impotent, are also perceptually active and productive. Articulating this struggle between the image’s shape and signification, Zelehoski realizes the subject’s concreteness and imperfection. The art-ist thus privileges the primacy of perceptual space and the illusory, “pic-torial” nature of the work, affirming the object’s abstractness over liter-alness.⁹ Through his reconstructive approach, Zelehoski contributes to the fertile territory between sculpture and painting, and proclaims the object’s “objecthood.”

Aliza Edelman, PhD

All works: found object assemblage

Pallet, 2010, 36 x 36”

Ladders, 2010, 74 x 42”

Do Not Cross, 2010, 58 x 86”

White Table, 2010, 28 x 22”

Chair, 2010, 29 x 19”

Con Ed, 2010, 20 x 20”

White Shelf, 2010, 45 x 30”

Horses, 2010, 37 x 51”

About Michael Zelehoski

Michael Zelehoski was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1979 and grew up in the Berkshire Hills. He attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard and completed his BA in Fine Art from the Universidad Finis Terrae, in Santiago, Chile. During this time, he apprenticed with the late Chilean sculptor Felix Maruenda.

Zelehoski has exhibited nationally and internationally including a re-cent solo show at The Berkshire Museum and is the recipient of various grants and awards, including a recent Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and Artslant’s Golden Frame Award. He divides his time be-tween the Berkshire Hills, New York and Los Angeles.

1 Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1945), 38.2 See William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 21.3 See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1978),” reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1994), 280.4 Michael Zelehoski, interview with author, June 27, 2010, Rhinebeck, New York. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. and ed. James M. Edie (Chicago, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), 16.6 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 330.7 Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” 15.8 See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects (1965),” reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax and New York: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, 1975), 181-89.9 See Michael Fried’s controversial essay “Art and Objecthood (1967),” reprinted in Art and Object-hood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 151.

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