Chris Oliver

Much of Oliver’s recent work stems directly from his interest in domestic buildings and house carpentry.  Having worked as a carpenter for several years he learned to think of a building and its parts as a construction in time and environment, as more of an event than a static object. Outside weather slowly thwarts all of the clever systems that have been invented to slow its damage; inside layer upon layer of the latest decorating styles accrue.

The pieces in this body of work are spawned from parts of buildings that the artist has removed from actual houses; a set of louver doors, a pile of molding, a window sill.  These objects, basted with polyurethane and enamel paint, are incorporated into new structures framed using scale lumber and conventional house building methods.  This work explores relationships between interior and exterior, concealed and revealed, full scale and model scale, lucid and liminal.