Chair Totem Pole is an homage to common everyday chairs. It is at once a gateway, a totem pole and a balancing act of three common chairs; a Shaker chair, a folding chair, and a stool. All rendered at double scale, stacked on top of one another and share a central axis; their legs.

In contrast to a series that Cetera made of painted steel copies of high design chairs such as the Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer, the Barcelona Chair by Mies Van der Rohe and the LC2 Petit Modele Armchair by Le Corbusier that commented on the accessibility of high design, these double-scale quotidian chairs are a monument to everyday life.

With a background in theater and performance, Cetera was inspired in part by Augusto Boal’s acting exercise “The Chair of Power,” which addresses the invention and reconfiguration of space and the spatial structures of power. Cetera is interested in what becomes sacred in the canon of design versus what is allowed to be reproduced, it’s accessibility, and who makes those decisions.

*Lea Cetera works in video, sculpture and performance to produce temporal installations that examine the space between object and body, public and private, the virtual and real. Utilizing techniques culled from film and theater, her work addresses constructed identities, the mediation of technology, the alienation of the human body, and the aura of the object/fetish.

Emerging from a collaborative background in theater and filmmaking, Cetera has performed and shown work in the US and internationally at venues such as Art in General, Sculpture Center, The Jewish Museum, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Southard Reid, Pilar Corrias, Simone Subal, High Desert Test Sites, Poetry Project at St. Marks Church on the Bowery, Anthology Film Archives and was awarded an emerging artist fellowship with Socrates Sculpture Park in 2016.

She holds an MFA from Columbia University, 2012 and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art, 2005. She lives and works in New York City.*