At a glance, the chairs designed and constructed by artist Joel D’ Orazio are playful and inviting. Some are large, others are small. Some have long tubes flowing from their neck curvature and some have jolly spectral gardens of color planted upon the seat.
D’Orazio gave a talk at the Katzen Museum of Art on Nov. 16 for the opening of his gallery “Pull Up a Chair.” The discussion was moderated by the Director and Curator of the Museum Jack Rasmussen about the creating of such fanciful chairs.
D’Orazio previously worked as an architect for 25 years as he and his twin brother followed in their father’s footsteps by attending college.
“When it was time to go to college, we didn’t have a choice,” D’Orazio said. “In fact we couldn’t think of anything else we wanted to do so architecture was it. We went to Catholic U and into D.C. and that’s what brought us here.”
But after traversing the D.C. architecture world by working on the first phase of the Watergate apartments called Watergate East and being employed by several firms, D’Orazio eventually opened an architecture firm of his own. However, the recession in 1991 took D’Orazio off his architecture track as his clientele put him on hold.
“I spent like 6 months and I had no real idea what I was going to do other than seeing through a lot of architecture magazines ads for real companies I’d liked showing their beautiful furniture,” D’Orazio said. “I thought I’ll approach these companies with my designs, sell my designs and get royalties.”
He created more than 200 furniture designs before moving on to building complicated glass top tables and finally transitioned into painting and sculpture. Most of the District’s trash became D’Orazio’s treasure as he collected all sorts of trinkets from the dumps to use in his work.
“Every day I would walk around and find fantastic things that I would work with,” D’Orazio said. “Sometimes they were just panels to paint on.”
He began to experiment with bowling balls by drilling holes into them and planting whatever found materials he could.
“Artists can be dumpster divers,” D’Orazio said. ”Though I don’t like to intellectualize my art. It’s always intuitive.”
When D’Orazio discovered the medium of chairs, he culled the raw matter for these pieces by using fiber optic cables from Comcast. He utilizes materials ranging from zip ties, cables and other synthetic elements into his pieces.
“The cable is mostly from Comcast and I get it out from mostly their dumpster or when I first started I would find big reel of cable on the side of the road,” D’Orazio said. “I’d find things at the edge of the road because people found that the dump would be closed and they didn’t want to take their stuff so they’d just leave it on the side of a hill.”
Joel D’Orazio’s “Pull Up a Chair” will be at the Katzen Museum of Art through Dec. 15.
