Lucky Chairs

2002-2024

Lucky Chairs” is a project begun during a visiting artist residency at Columbia College in the Fall of 2002. During the time when consumer point-and-shoot cameras were first becoming popular, a Canon Powershot was used to document hundreds of attempts to position, stack and balance one to five institutional oak chairs. The digital files were printed onto 35mm Kodak Ektachrome film and projected using 6 auto-advance Kodak carousel (80) slide projectors for an exhibition in the space where the work was made. Subsequently the project has manifested in various forms, including a 5-projector installation, a “Sampler” one-carousel/projector version, and several print additions. The work has been shown in multiple venues, each time reworked to reflect the specific architectural setting of exhibition.

Photographic Truth, Performance, and Slight of Hand > Lucky Chairs (excerpt from a lecture) 

I got to thinking about the coincidence of the photo with the activity, the “truth” of the image – an almost entirely discredited concept with the normalization of digital manipulation – and the veracity of the performance itself (always in doubt with regard to a trick or stunt). Some of the earliest photographs and films, for instance, were made by vaudevillians – magicians, strongmen, daredevils, and acrobats. I became fascinated by this mélange of trickery with its provocation to “believe it or not,” and the “believe-it-ornot” of a picture, itself a lie from the very beginning. But I was also interested in the absurdity of the act itself, it’s pathetic but also intimate quality. In addition to the actions outdoors, I began to think about doing equally silly things around the house: like stacking up some chairs and balancing bits of wood and other objects; or forming a trail of plywood scraps; or erecting a bridge of books, and snapping the picture before they all fall down.

All of these concerns seem to have come together in a project I did last fall in Chicago: the idea that the work be generated by a site, created from a set of givens; using whatever is at hand; doing something performative, ephemeral, utterly useless; something behind closed doors, beneath the purview of any watchful eye; dealing with language; putting into play the photographic image – in this case digital – with a trick or slight of hand (both the photo and trick entailing discourses concerning authenticity, veracity and credulity); and producing, as all illusionists or artful deceivers have always attempted to do, the indeterminate object – one full of wonder. Wonder in its double sense: that is, marvel conjoined with doubt. The project is called “Lucky Chairs.” The Chicago exhibition was called “Private View,” installed in the space where the images were taken. The installation conformed to the architectural selling. There were 480 images in all, projected as a slide show from six automatic advancing carousel projectors. The timed advance was set to eight seconds, but the projectors were not synched in any particular way. The images are permutations of chairs. One, two, three, four, or five chairs stacked, balanced, barely supported; only just remaining in place; that is, just long enough for me to make the photograph.

— Stephan Pascher August, 2003

Debra Parr, lucky Chairs