Art That Takes a Stand, and a Seat : Exhibit: A Sylmar gallery explores the use of furniture in art as a metaphor for the human condition.

David Feinner will give an arm and a leg for an arm and a leg.

Of a table or chair, that is.

Feinner, a Northridge artist who makes furniture from discarded objects, climbs into dumpsters, digs through piles of debris at construction sites, raids glass shops for shower door parts.

“I just keep my eyes open and when I find something interesting, I throw it in the truck,” said Feinner, who cruises the Valley in his red Nissan. “I could say I’m environmentally oriented, but really I’m just cheap.”

Feinner’s tables, chairs, lamps, and headboards are on display at the Century Gallery in Sylmar, along with works of 13 other artists in an exhibit titled “Furniture as the Artist’s Subject.”

The show, open through Feb. 22, features functional pieces, paintings of furniture and decorated chairs meant purely for display.

“It occurred to me that furniture has been around since we first sat on a rock in a cave,” said Cynthia Carr, the show’s curator. “It expresses the personality of the artist and serves as a metaphor for the human condition.”

Feinner, 32, turns others’ castoffs into art by staking out alleys behind houses under renovation, where he has picked up everything but the kitchen sink.

He did, however, find a bathroom sink, which he used for the base of a bird-bath. For the tub, he affixed a barbecue and welded three pieces of bent electrical conduit to give the birds a place to rest.

People can do the same on Feinner’s bright blue chair, the back and seat of which were made from a chain-link fence. They also can plop on a bed and lean against a blackened gray headboard that Feinner made by putting a piece of shower glass between parts of wooden doors.

Also on display is a coffee table he made by pouring stucco around a drainage grate. The table has two wrought-iron legs and two wooden legs that came from the base of an old parking sign. (Feinner notes that he did not take the sign itself. He does have rules: “I don’t steal, I don’t cause traffic jams, and I don’t stop on freeways.”)

If Feinner provides the meat and potatoes of furniture--chairs and tables--Pamela Weir-Quiton makes the caviar: “Man-Icons.” Her wooden mannequins, whimsical stick figures, allow an indecisive dresser to experiment with various wardrobe combinations before making a commitment.

“They can either be sculpture or you can add pieces to them where they almost represent you, like a display in your own dressing room,” she said.

Weir-Quiton has sold pine mannequins to Neiman Marcus, which will use them to display a line of silk clothing. For the exhibit, she has dressed one in a black kimono.

Also on display is a dresser that resembles a toy soldier, with drawers down the front and a compartment in the head. Weir-Quiton made the piece in 1966, while a student at Cal State Northridge, and used the larger drawers for lingerie and the small ones for her false eyelashes.

Weir-Quiton said her work is “supposed to put people in touch with when they were kids, with the joy of playing.”

She originally wanted to study fashion design in New York, but her parents wanted her to stay in Los Angeles, so she enrolled at CSUN. “I hated drawing naked, fat people, and I didn’t like graphics,” she said. “So, by process of elimination I ended up in wood shop.”

And she fell in love. “I love sanding and measuring and drilling and marking and gluing . . . And it’s a lot like sewing--if you don’t watch what you’re doing, you can hurt your fingers.”

Not all of the work in the exhibit is as joyful. Some of the paintings express the darker side of the human condition.

The paintings of Carol Perry-Caddes, for example, are more somber and mysterious, with a strange sense of scale. Objects in some of them--including a chair, a frog in mid-leap and a wilting rose--seem to be both anchored and floating.

One painting features two stuffed gray chairs in a large black room; coming from one side of the painting is what appears to be a piece of shrimp between two chopsticks. “You get this real dislocation--where in space is this, where a piece of shrimp is as large as a chair?” Carr said.

Irony also pervades the paintings of Janice DeLoof. Empty chairs and faceless people seem to express isolation and loneliness, yet cool skies and delicate clouds provide a sense of calm and reassurance.

One painting, titled “Neighbors,” features two houses on a black background. Inside one house, two chairs are toppled over, and yellow paint leaves the lonely effect of a light left on. Inside the other house, painted in warm reds and oranges, two upright chairs sit next to a plant on a stand.

Other DeLoof paintings feature men and women sitting in chairs, but the people have no eyes, noses or mouths. And they’re sitting apart from each other, with no apparent recognition of the other. “Even though we live in houses with families, we’re still isolated from each other psychologically,” Carr said.

The show also features a bedroom set by Stan Long, an interior designer and general contractor. There’s a steel-framed bed with a headboard shaped like a house. The pillow cases and sheets are silk-screened with a black and white pattern and gold trim.

In front of the bed is a media unit, with space for a TV, VCR and stereo.

“I got so tired of furniture that doesn’t work--chairs you can’t sit in, drawers that don’t hold video tapes and tables that aren’t the right height,” said Long, 35, who lives in Los Feliz. “If you wanted to be uncomfortable, you’d sit on a rock.”

Jeff Bollen’s steel chair looks about as comfortable as a rock, but surprisingly, it provides a nice cushion. The chair, made from part of an old couch, is shaped as the upper half of a man who is lying on the floor, with his hands pushing upward.

The show’s works range in price from $300 to $8,000.

“Furniture as the Artist’s Subject” is on display through Feb. 22 at Century Gallery, 13000 Sayre St., Sylmar; telephone (818) 362-3220. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.