Patterning Particularity: Adrienne Spier's Furniture Sculptures

This essay showcases a few of Adrienne Spier’s works from the past decade, culminating in her recent solo exhibition Grade at Parisian Laundry, October-November 2010. Spier’s work has always been concerned with the dialogue between sculpture and flatness; in Grade, she presents flattened school desks photographically in a geometric classroom pattern. This act of patterning invites curiosity about the desks’ particularity; the accompanying Inside Desks series offers a glimpse of the layered graffiti accrued over years of use on the interior surface of the desks. Presenting flattened furniture in myriad ways, Spier challenges us to mediate between particularity and pattern.