There’s a reason people write breakup songs. Music can convey history, shifts in tone, and complex and contradictory emotions better than most mediums. Somehow, Montpelier artist Ben Cheney has managed to do all that — not with a melody, but through furniture.
With “New Beginnings, Old Stories,” his solo show on view through November 23 at Axel’s Gallery in Waterbury, Cheney presents a collection of sculpture, furniture and lamps thatspeak to the amicable end of a 25-year relationship.
Cheney works primarily in steel and wood. He founded Flywheel Industrial Arts, a company that mainly builds commercial signage, custom staircases and kitchens; visitors can pop across the street to see a Flywheel-made bench and other infrastructure in the recently revitalized Stowe Street Alley. One of his new collection’s strengths is that it imparts tenderness to material that usually projects utility.
The show’s central work is “Emotions,” an interactive piece installed on a custom-built U-shaped shelf surrounding a partition wall in the gallery. Cheney has placed 22 objects on the shelf, as well as a small cabinet. Two lamps, one on each side of the wall, focus light by which viewers can examine the objects. Visitors are encouraged to pick them up, move them around or place them in the cabinet.
Most of these objects are hunks of steel — some curved, some lumpy, some crumpled like a piece of paper. Two are made from perforated steel; one is gilded and shiny. A 4-inch cube is surprisingly heavy and rattles when shaken. Some objects are uncomfortably spiky; others fit satisfyingly in the palm of your hand.
One of the objects is painted jade green, or “grandma green,” as Cheney calls it. The color pops up as an accent in most of the pieces in the show, unifying sculpture and functional furniture remarkably well. Cheney said this particular green was a color he and his wife could usually agree on when making decorative decisions.
“Emotions” slips easily back and forth between material and metaphor. Placing an object in the cabinet — stamped with the phrase “what is inside you” — might seem like a literal take on hiding one’s feelings, but each “emotion” is wholly inscrutable. You don’t know what you’re hiding or, for that matter, uncovering.
Other works incorporate antiques. Cheney has combined a rounded glass-and-wood buffet cabinet with a steel table and green accents to make an imposing, 6-foot-tall piece of furniture that’s both balanced and sharply divided. A lamp fashioned from a brass fire extinguisher shines its light on an eggshell in a perfectly round nest. Cheney said he noticed the absence left by the antiques the couple had collected, but which were primarily his wife’s passion. The furniture in the show is a sometimes uneasy reconciliation of their two styles.
A viewer can find meaning in Cheney’s functional pieces, though that meaning might not be apparent outside the show’s context. A low coffee table, about two feet wide, is made from a 6-inch-thick slab of wood on a steel base: it’s so heavy that it’s simply not going anywhere. A geometric steel table lamp looks torn and peeled back, light bouncing off gold leaf on its interior surface.
The most narrative piece in the show is an oak-and-brass rack displaying 46 matchbooks. Each one’s origin — Florence, Bermuda, Kuala Lumpur, the couple’s own wedding — tells us where they’ve been but not what happened there. These read as pieces of a private history, innocuous mementos with the potential to ignite.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2024.
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