JOHNNY SWING MURMURATION May 3rd – June 29th Opening reception Monday May 7th
Sebastian + Barquet is pleased to announce Murmuration, the gallery’s first exhibition of the work of Johnny Swing. The show brings together five examples of Swing’s iconic coin furniture, and will serve as the debut of his most recent and ambitious work to date, Murmuration (2012). A fully illustrated catalogue showcasing each of the works from the series, with essays by David Collens, Judd Tully and James Zemaitis, will accompany the exhibition.
Born in Connecticut in 1961, Johnny Swing lives and works in rural Vermont, though set up his first studio in 1986 in an abandoned gas station on the corner of 2nd street and Avenue B on New York’s Lower East Side. Space 2B served as both workshop and showcase for his and other artists and designers work, and was the venue for his initial experiments with repurposed found objects and furniture. Embracing the contradictory principles of Postmodernism and with limited funds Swing, a welder from the age of 13, salvaged his materials wherever he could. Most notable amongst his earliest designs was the Tack Chair (1987). Made using 35 individually welded steel dock washers retrieved from a dumpster, the chair marked the beginning of the distinctive sculptural style that would become his signature.
Swing’s first experiment with coins came eight years later during his first year in Vermont, with the Penny Chair (1995). Keen to find a familiar and inexpensive material that was easy to get hold of on his isolated mountainside he turned to pocket change. At first he adopted a form comparable to Bertoia’s Diamond chair, though with an incredibly complex leg structure of four inverted pyramids. Built from the base up, each example required 6,500 pennies, 30,875 welds, and about a month’s hard labor to build. To weld successfully, the pennies had to be pre-1983, when they were still made predominantly of copper rather than zinc. Ultimately due to their size the penny proved a difficult material to work with and of the two chairs he produced, both are now in private collections. The next logical step was the Nickel. Five times more expensive but a larger surface area and easier to weld, the nickel proved a more forgiving material and allowed Swing increased room for experimentation with more ambitious forms. Intent on developing a more efficient production process, he began by carving the form of the Nickel Couch (2000) from a block of fiberglass foam, then cast a negative mold in concrete to form the template for the coin surface. Each nickel was then bent and welded into place by hand.
Swing still employs this same process today, hand making each new piece individually, and the five works included in the exhibition chart his development over the past decade. His increasingly fluid sculptural forms belie the rigidity of his chosen medium, their undulating surfaces gently contorting with unnatural ease. Central to his practice is the importance of his materials, exposing their inherent nature with a witty detachment from their intended utility. Nothing is taken at face value.
