All Things Considered

HASSAN ALI

VISUAL ART can refer to a broad category of things. Most often, what one sees in art galleries around the nation in this genre are paintings, costumes, statues and, more recently, digital art.

Marlon Darbeau’s latest exhibition, Things Considered, at The Frame Shop falls outside of these categories. Darbeau’s pieces in this show could be thought of as falling into the “statue” category but it’s, perhaps, more useful to think of them as furniture. Darbeau takes staples of the home and imbues them with a sense of locality.

Darbeau is a designer the founder of By Making, an object design studio. He is also the co-founder of Praktis Design which specialises in design communication. He has practised in various disciplines including identity design, packaging and furniture design. He comes from a family tradition of making things in workshops, either at home or very close to home.

Frou Frou, the jars/incense holders one sees to their left as they enter the gallery, look like heads at first. One of these is black and the remainder are white. The base of the jar is cylindrical before it burgeons outward into its “jaw” which runs around the entire object. In this wider middle section of the object, two alternating symbols poke out: one is a hummingbird hovering over a five-petalled flower (or a gas tank valve); the other is a circle with an eight point star within. On top of the object sits a fancy sailor hat with three holes in its apex – the spot where one may stick their incense. The hat is the object’s lid. When lifted, it reveals that the ceramic head can also function as a jar.

Following Frou Frou, audiences will see several cups with brass plates placed either above or below them. The cups themselves are blue on the outside with a reddish-orange on the inside. The handles on either side of the cup are horn shaped. The brass plate features a circular hole with lines seeming to radiate out from it – a depiction of the sun. The name Dawn should ring a bell for the Carnival-goers in the audience. The blue cup breathing out fire from its reddish-orange interior, the horns, and the sun are all references to jab jabs and J’Ouvert morning.

Darbeau says, in his youth, he would attend Carnival religiously, along with his father. He says throughout the show he’s trying to not only create functional objects but to infuse them with feeling and familiarity as well.

There’s humour in Darbeau’s work as well. Next to the Dawn cups, several traffic cones stand on a pedestal. However, unlike the typical bright orange traffic cones one sees in parking lots or near road-side construction, Darbeau’s are made of wood and steel. Their bases are a square, steel platform from which wooden cone begins to shoot upward before being crowned by a red tip. The cones are hollow and some have flowers placed within while others have translucent tubes shooting upward. These are titled Stop-It and are listed as doorstops.

A small side table, titled Plugged, has the form of an electrical plug built into its design.

The remainder of the show consists of a three part series of mailboxes called Impossible Home, a bench named Truckfender which Darbeau thought of one day while sitting in traffic, a truck horn made of appamat wood, and a valet stand which Darbeau says was inspired by jack-up rigs.

It must be stated that the materials with which these pieces have been constructed are all locally available and commonly used in home-building and decoration creation. The teak wood in Stop-It, the appamat of the truck horn, the treated pine of the three Impossible Home(s), the galvanise, various stains and paints used throughout the show are all common words in the craftsperson’s vocabulary.

Whether one draws the connections between Darbeau’s inspirational sources – the sailors, the rigs – or not is inconsequential here. Darbeau isn’t trying to create a singular narrative progression motivated by symbolic storytelling. Rather, he is trying to show that design and craftsmanship can be vessels for communication.

Darbeau designed these objects and outsourced the creation of them to local craftspeople. As a result, the show is both a showcase of Darbeau’s own creativity in the design realm and the capability of our local artisans to produce more creative objects for everyday use. There was a time in this country, prior to furniture megastores, wherein one needed to contact a joiner or a carpenter if they wanted a table made – one had to go directly to the creative source of the product they were seeking.

Now, one goes to a furniture store, picks up whichever decorative items or furniture snatches their attention and fits the décor of their home. Craftspeople and artisans in this country have not gone extinct but the demand for these individually made goods has dwindled with the growth of readily available options. Distance has been created between TT’s creative sector and the population at large. Darbeau reminds us that, despite this growing distance, there are still people creating locally with TT’s cultural aesthetics and sensitivities in mind.

Things Considered opened on September 20 and continues until October 4. You can visit the exhibition at The Frame Shop on the corner of Carlos and Roberts Streets, Woodbrook. The gallery’s opening hours are 9 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday and 9 am to 2 pm on Saturdays.