A living room explosion of rugs and skeletal wooden furniture frames is dotted across the space of Saamlung gallery this month.

The work of New York essayist and sculptor, John Powers, the current exhibition ‘Suite of Suites’ references furniture as functional objects as well as abstraction and minimalism. A series of rectangular sculptures sprout like cancerous growths, cloning each other in various sizes across the floor on small red Persian rugs. They too have mutated, rising out of the floor in sharp geometric 3D angles like a hallucinatory experiment.

Powers has spent 16 years building rectangles in every possible permutation and size. In this exhibition the artist wanted to experiment with furniture-making while trying hard to avoid making the works look like furniture themselves. The result resembles a living room come to life in a Jan Svankmajer animation.

Displayed in the small gallery space there’s more than a touch of commentary on the place of art in the lilliputian-sized living spaces that typify Hong Kong. Installed on the floor instead of the traditional pedestal for sculptures, the project is “an experiment with the capacity of ‘non-pedestal’ sculpture to move from the gallery to the home, and back again.”

John Powers: ‘Suite of Suites’
19 October-17 November2012
Samlung
26B Two Chinachem Plaza
68 Connaught Rd. C. Central,HongKong
Tue-Fri 1-7,Sat 12-6