when an object reaches for your hand

We recently had the opportunity to work with Ann Hamilton to fabricate gallery furniture for her exhibition “when an object reaches for your hand”, which was part of the HERE exhibition featuring solo shows by Ann, Maya Lin and Jenny Holzer, organized in celebration of the Wexner Center’s 30th year anniversary. We fabricated 70 stands that each held a stack of image prints of rarely seen objects Ann photographed from OSU special and other private collections. Visitors were encouraged to take a print from the stacks for themselves or to mail to an address of their choice from one of three mailing stations (which we also fabricated, along with additional shelves and narrow profile frames for a series of collage works also in the exhibition.) We were asked to develop a wood-based design for these stands that would have a thin profile similar to ones that were previously fabricated from steel. Additionally, they needed to be both stable as well as something that could be disassembled, stored, and reassembled for future exhibitions. To achieve these design requirements, we fabricated hollow legs (each in two sections - lower and upper). The solid stand tops had threaded nuts embedded inside at each corner. A threaded rod passed through the bottom section of leg, a lower frame, and then the upper section of leg. The rod was threaded into the embedded nuts, accessible from the bottom of the stand tops. The threaded rod was then tightened by a nut at the bottom of the lower section of the legs. This pulled the stands very stiff and square and concealed all hardware inside the thin stand structure. A foot threaded into the bottom of each leg, completing the assembly. Our production of this project took us to the very last bit of our time frame, so we unfortunately don’t have documentation of the assembly and disassembly process (we had planned for a nice stop motion animation video, but had to get things right into the truck for transport!) We were excited about the design and how everything worked, but as with everything, we figured a few improvements along the way. We have a project underway to fabricate a sample of the refined design - we’ll post that here once it is done - and take that opportunity to make the stop motion assembly video we ran out of time for before!

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