This Furniture’s Function Takes a Backseat to Form

With David Perry’s slyly designed--and deconstructed--furniture, form doesn’t so much follow function, as gently undermines it. Until you look more closely, there is something cozy and inviting about the group of sculptural pieces Perry calls “Popular Furniture Objects,” at the Woodbury University Art Gallery.

And looking closely, pondering our built-in assumptions, is the proper response to his soft-edged yet challenging work.

“Cliff’s Chair” is fitted with fat, extra cushions, which rend it from comfy to forbidding. “Comforter” is a hanging wall piece “woven” from pieces of Formica covered with pine veneer, hardly something you’d want on your bed on a cold winter’s night.

Perry likes to wreak havoc with our expectations about what furniture means. In a statement, he writes, “The merging of experience and object is not exclusively internal or personal,” referring to the ability of furniture to trigger social behavior and nostalgia.

Perry sets out to sabotage those fondly held attitudes with varying degrees of subversiveness.

He doesn’t mind testing cherished values about domesticity, including the world of baby gear. In “Emma’s Cell,” a baby seat is set up as a friendly wood-slatted holding tank, while “Emma’s Cart” is a tiny throne on wheels, clearly an unsafe vehicle for a balance-challenged toddler.

At times, his approach has to do with shifting the emphasis and embracing paradox. With “Light,” an elegant dark-stained wooden drawer serves as a power strip for a garish and blinding light fixture of cascading, fluorescent hoops on the wall.

Perry’s work, at first glance, appears to adhere to the form-follows-function, Bauhaus aesthetics, but tilting off the conceptual drawing board. Most of the pieces are barely functional, if at all.

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These are elegantly fashioned and neatly proportioned pieces, both modern and woodsy. Literal sections of tree are sometimes used as tabletops or seat bottoms (it’s not clear which is which).

So these intriguingly personalized variations on objects we know and love, are, in the end, laced with irony.

“Table and Chair” holds semi-functional potential, with its curious grafting of a dining chair onto a small table. But the two objects have been set at a disorienting angle, breaking the traditional relationship of the body to a table--a fully frontal proposition.

The challenge goes further into absurdity with “Settee,” another merger piece in which elements of three hard-backed chairs are joined in a composition that skewers usability. There’s nowhere to sit, without risking muscle cramping.

Faced with this quandary, the viewer is left to question the object’s identity. Is it furniture or art? Denied user-friendly duty as the former, we opt for the latter. That very line of thinking--and rethinking--is integral to the life of Perry’s art.

* “David Perry: Popular Furniture Objects,” through May 23 at Woodbury University Art Gallery, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank; (818) 792-5101.

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Co-Existent Mediums: Few brains will be strained in understanding what’s behind the playful exhibition title, “Oil and Water Do Mix,” a group show at Artspace in Woodland Hills. We have oil paintings, we have watercolors, and things in-between.

Presented by Artist’s Co-op and Everywoman’s Village, the show presumably wants to make an egalitarian statement about the happy co-existence of divergent media, as if to ask, “Can’t we all get along?” What it really adds up to, though, is a hodgepodge of a show gathered under one roof, with no particular curatorial mandate.

But who’s complaining? Nicely lit gallery spaces such as this are always a welcome part of the neighborhood, and virtually every show put on here has meritorious high points alongside mediocrity. This show is no different.

Barbara Ryan’s endearing “Fantasy Landscapes” are kindly abstractions whose curvy, colorful nature dreams were created, it would seem, under the influence of “Yellow Submarine” graphics.

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The Picasso influence is worn on the sleeve by Gwen Gainsford Farmer, with pastels of softened figure studies and Cubist, fragmented picture planes.

Watercolor and ink pieces by Carol Gordon show a subtlety lacking in much of the art here. With her landscapes--including New York City’s Central Park--and vague figures, Gordon deftly blends precise ink gestures and nebulous washes in a way that echoes Oriental influences, in terms of space and visual rhythm.

Debbi Saunders flaunts a vivid palette and dense placement of imagery, but exerts a certain retina-jangling charm. At times, her paintings tap into some of the syncopated energy of the great American painter Stuart Davis.

For Arnie “Mars” Marmorstein, the issue of medium is a loose one, subject to change. He draws on “assorted water media” and ink in creating his engagingly busy, shuffling compositions that take left turns away from realism. For this artist, at least, the mixed media is part of the message.

* “Oil and Water Do Mix,” group show through 21800 Oxnard St., Suite 110, Woodland Hills; (818) 716-2786.