Retrofit

RE

T I F O R T ry

Cha

’Lea O s e l r

Retrofit was completed as a Degree project for the Department of Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Completed under the instruction of Annie Evelyn, Christopher Specce and Lothar Windels during the Spring 2016 term.

Special thanks and dedication to the following people, without whose support I probably would have died: Brian O’Leary Elizabeth McCarthy Anne O’Leary Ratth Ezra Choup

ION

CT INTRODU

This past summer Caitlyn Jenner, once known as Olympic medalist and Kardashian patriarch Bruce, announced her transition from male to female. Juliana Huxtable, a black trans artist, had her work and a sculpture of herself (produced by Frank Benson) exhibited in the New Museum Triennial. Terms like queerness and intersectionality become part of the common lexicon, addressing the increasingly complicated state our identities occupy socially and politically.

This shift in visibility and language marked a turning point for me as individual and maker. Your self-presentation and the visibility you garner merged personal aesthetics with political meaning. All social interactions and expressions became tinged with micro political meaning. Despite this rise in visibility, I always found there was little intersection between this mode and my design practice. The goal of design, as I was taught, was to serve industry and the consuming masses – addressing the widest audience possible. The more I studied queer theory and observed the cultural move towards politicizing the personal, the further it seemed from a lot of the design world. I found decorating my apartment more dynamic and engaging than designing. In Diana Ross’s song It’s My House, she describes her home to a potential lover. She explains how every decision, from where she placed her chair to the books on the shelf, reflects her sensuousness as a lover. In this way, her house becomes a stand-in for herself. When we decorate our homes, we piece together an ideal version of ourselves.

Retrofit as a term emerged from my parents’ ongoing renovation of their new house. Used to describe the outfitting of an old structure with new parts, the act takes on a life of its own. My parents opted to build their dream home from the former home of playwright William Gibson. To build a dream home with heat, they had to take out almost every wall. We watched his play as we gutted his kitchen. My dad shows me photos of the renovation first thing when I come home from school. Physically and conceptually, retrofit is a necessary step to adapting and appropriating pre-existing things for our wants and needs. With retrofit, I found an agreement between the queer personal and design: new concepts are best communicated thru already existing things.

From this beginning, Retrofit has become an investigation of how queer narrative and representation can be cultivated thru our relationships to pre-existing objects. How can the process of making objects be as dynamic and formative as decorating ones home? In short, Retrofit instigates forms of self-fashioning in object making, and how this self-fashioning relates to the built environment.

Lastly, I want to dedicate this project to my mom, Elizabeth McCarthy and dad, Brian O’Leary.

ENTS M U MON ERIALITY MAT D N A

I was born and raised in the archetypal suburbs of New Jersey. My mom’s last name is McCarthy and my dad’s is O’Leary, so you can rightfully assume I’m Irish. With red hair, blue eyes, freckles, and a moderate amount of Catholic guilt, I grew up readily identifying with the background. My mom had a similar upbringing, the daughter of upper middle class Irish Catholics. She decorated our house following the same principles as her mom – 90-degree angles, right with the world, everything in its right place, cleanliness next to godliness. Friends had no interest in coming to my house, as they feared the repercussions of soiling its sacred ground. Growing up I never really understood the underlying ideology, but accepted it verbatim. It perplexed me that my friends’ parents let them paint murals on their walls (or paint their walls at all for that matter), or allowed basements to become hangout dens littered with shit. There was rationale in the way that we lived our life.

For the first few years after I came out to my parents, I really feared being perceived as or associated with feminine gay culture. My mom couldn’t conceive where this form of self-loathing came from. She didn’t readily scold me for my newfound sexuality at age 14. I couldn’t really figure it out either. Femme culture to me was inextricably tied to terms like sassy, ditzy, messy, and frankly dumb. It existed in contrast to the sort of order and exceptionalism that I was raised with.

Looking back on that house, it feels like a monument to all the values I associate with Irish Catholicism – self-mastery, stoicism, logic-over-emotions, labor-is-love, distinctly masculine values.

When I moved into my first apartment a year and a half ago, my roommate and I painted every single room in the house. Our performance floundered for the first month of school because the project that was our apartment came first. I had just broken off what felt like my first adult relationship that summer, and I couldn’t wait to remake myself on the apartment walls. I painted my room a color called My Fair Lady pink. My mom came with me to Home Depot to look at swatches. She disliked the color, wanting me to pick the daintier, more muted version. I shirked her opinion, painting the walls so vibrant I can see the room from three blocks away. It was thru My Fair Lady pink that I started to re-cast myself. I painted the trim satin finish Linen White as lip service to my mom’s tried-and-true color choices.

ENTS

UM LIL MON

As I mentioned before, I grew up in New Jersey. My parents and the majority of my relatives grew up (and still reside in) the Greater Boston area. My personal taste is soaked with New England architecture, its monumentality and obsession with cheap replicas of classical Greek temples. These details have become a stand-in for Catholic masculinity. I try to photograph examples of where this décor is used in a funny way. The above photo is a pediment with fake carved fruit adjacent to RISD campus. The fruit is tacky, but opting to elevate this tackiness with iconic architectural forms is hilarious.

Relief of builder’s hands in a brick wall

Pillaster inset into wall outside Metcalf

34 repeat pattern on 34th St trash can

Shopping bags wrapped around a fence

All of these photos come from a small collection I’ve assembled that I’ve taken to calling LIL MONUMENTS. A Lil Monument occurs when an architectural detail is presented or arranged in a strange way, rendering it emotive or comical. LIL MONUMENTS became a vocabulary of ways that this monumental décor could become humanized or anthropomorphized.

I recently discovered that Home Depot is a haven of readymade dĂŠcor. You can buy columns wrapped in plaster, pilasters to put in your room, fake laminates of brick, concrete, marble. On my first trip there, I saw an offcut of vinyl gutter tubing on the floor. The gutter tube is ribbed, partially for greater structural integrity, but largely so as to integrate with a lot of the architectural details mentioned before.

The tube reminded me of a Doric pilaster, so I convinced the saleswoman to let me have it free of charge.

The tube at first was a cheap ($8 for 10 feet) means of mocking up the decorative legs for a table I was planning (which translated into the second object). I wanted the decorative nature of the tube to seem authentic, not a glossy plastic. I crudely casted plaster into it, then cutting the tube apart to demold it. It worked surprisingly well as a mold. The details of the ridges were preserved and the plaster didn’t stick to the tube walls at all. The resulting cast read like an actual decorative detail, and I started seeing the tubing as a ready to go mold.

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Sketches of Centerpiece. Using the mitered gutter, I would build a frame for a newspaper laminate. Initially I conceived of creating a fake newspaper laminate, though soon moved to using real newspaper layers with resin.

Based from the technique I used to do the cast corner (taping and hot gluing the mitered tubing), I was able to create a mold for the frame.

After assembling the frame, I cut a few grooves to make sure the cast stayed relatively level. While this mold can only be used once (to demold it requires cutting it fully open), it’s a cheap and fast process to produce molds. In the modeling process, I decided to have the unfurled note be an actual newspaper, and the frame was made using the same tubes I made my mockup with.

Making the paper rigid was a more complex process. The ink embedded in the paper resisted the resin, so many of my inital tries either didn’t laminate or weren’t structural. I learned that double coating after about 30 minutes allowed the first coat of resin to seal off the ink resist, making the second coat bind the next layer. In order to get a clean top layer, I had to spray adhere several clean layers on top. This made it so the resin didn’t permeate to the top face. To have the paper hold shape, I taped it onto a mockup of the plaster frame.

UTILITY AND FAILURE My neighbors took this chair out after it’s back gave out. The wind blew the chair over, forcing it to lie prostrate on the ground. I was packing to go back to New Jersey when I saw it. I immediately took a picture of it, captioning it “me going back to New Jersey.”

It’s a lot of fun to anthropomorphize things. It’s one of my main rationales for opting to be a furniture designer instead of a painter or an economist. There’s a distinct joy in finding humanity in things.

Otherwise, as Milan Kundera put it, the ubiquitous order of the world’d crush us. Seeing this chair lay prostrate, I viewed it accepting its defeat as though the world were watching it. It knew to render its defeat humorous, theatrical. Identifying this shift in the chair’s emotive quality, I was interested in what set up this scenario – what made this moment suddenly human and emotional? Why was it so funny that the back legs of a chair gave out?

We laugh when things are dislodged from their initial meaning. The chair, a utility object, becomes useless, instead a vessel for a variety of feelings. Utility and failure are contradictory states. A utility object is useful, dependable. It continually and without a doubt performs its designated function. While the chair is more identifiably human

(with legs and a back), I’d argue that all utility objects acquire a sort of humanity when they fail to perform their function. They develop humility, become earnest.

As part of our thesis coursework, we had to do brain-mapping exercises. We had to bring in, images, texts, etc. we found relevant to sort into a number of themes. I brought in a lot of the images from my LIL MONUMENTS collection, with images of bricks, pilasters, tarps, objects from home renovations, and lastly the platitude Perception is reality. The adage by itself reiterates that one’s experience is factual and that we should follow our intuition. If you’re not too cynical to follow it, it becomes a mantra in opting to follow your gut. In sorting the images, I moved this phrase next to an image of tarp covering concrete and the prostrate chair. While platitudes by definition are cliché (and annoying), they require what I think is a rare sincerity to live by. Thinking on this, I became really attached to simple adages with sincere, emotional intent.

The prostrate chair possesses a similar flavor of sincerity. With its shoulders to the ground and ass in the air, it states I have given up with absolute clarity. Connecting the sincerity and emotionality of these two devices, I reconceived my initial idea (of an entry hall table) into my second piece.

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Some sketches for the entry hall table. My initial focus for the table was to have the tabletop read as a sort of intimate note or confession.

This would be communicated thru the curled paper-esque bend in the tabletop paired with some sort of text. I wanted this bend to be more the simulation of paper (rather than literal paper like the first piece) so as to elevate the displaced nature of the table. I chose to maintain the entry hall table archetype, as its role as a presentation object seemed relevant to the sort of intimacy I wanted.

Packing slip reconceived as confession of fragility

Kinda funny but still useful tarp

Robert Gober’s The Subconscious

House siding used vertically in Gropius House

Preliminary mock-up of the entry hall table made during the first project. The curling was relatively simple, only occurring at the corners. This would allow the table to be somewhat functional, and would draw the viewer’s eye to the understructure of the table.

Endearing PSA on Angell St.

The decision to use tarp was at first an arbitrary one. I’ve had an interest in the material’s color and surface quality, and felt as though that stemmed from somewhere. In looking back, I distinctly remember my brother coming back from a two month long summer camp, and us covering the front facade of our house with a message stating, “WELCOME BACK FRANK.” Harping back on this memory, I wanted to inscribe a message into the tarp in a more polished way, but still keep up the sort of sensitivity and emotional quality of the FRAGILE sticker (prior page). The line “ME? GOING THRU A TOUGHIE HONESTLY” emerged from a text (see next page) I wrote earlier this semester. I was really attached to the way that a term like toughie aestheticized a complex feeling. It seemed indirectly connected to the sort of embodiment in the prostrate chair.

The legs on the Toughie Console emerged from a call-and-response kind of process. For the third time this year, a RISD course brought me to the Gropius House. The center atrium of the house utilized house siding running vertically. I found this material transition simple and compelling. I bought the beadboard on this whim, thinking I’d cover all four sides of the leg. After gluing two of the sides on a leg model, I became enamored with the exposed plywood. The idea of exposing the construction (also alluding to the toughie the piece is going thru) evolved into the foam laminate with spackle in the final model.

EN YOU’RE H W L E E F T THA E DANCE DANCING TH Katey and I are huddled at our kitchen table, encircled by houseplants and ornate dining chairs. I’m trying to bask in early morning light, but our heat doesn’t work and my eyes look like punched-in clay. Our landlord warned us the dining room ceiling plaster looked weak, and I of course neglected this fact. That is, until late last night when I was crying at the dining table and a two-pound chunk collapsed on my head. I called the re-plastering number our landlord left for us, and we quickly exported all the furniture and décor to other rooms that morning.

Me? I’m going thru a toughie in all honesty. I forgot my mom’s central mantra, “When you feel bad do something good for someone else,” this week because I don’t feel as accountable and being good to others tends to cost money. That and every moment I stop physically moving, the adrenaline transfers into my brain. The adrenaline turns into a bad cycle, where I convince myself that A. I have never treated myself well emotionally, B. I definitely contracted HIV, despite being tested negative last week, and C. my horoscope was right and my boyfriend duped me into perpetrating actions I can’t justify to the other people I love. To keep myself from getting into the cycle, I have tried to work ceaselessly. Though the adrenaline transfer is getting faster and faster, and I’m having more and more trouble generating tasks to hold it at bay. The laundry is done, I am out of money for materials, and I’m in the midst of writing this entry. I called my mom the last time the adrenaline cycled, and when she asked how many jobs I applied for, I snapped about how manipulative it is to constantly prompt my shitty feelings into pragmatic gestures for the rest of the phone call. Once she hung up on me, I waited fifteen minutes and then wrote four cover letters.

This morning is the first time I’ve seen Katey in about a week. Our work schedules have never aligned, despite me trying to wake up earlier and her trying to make her morning routines less stringent. I’m trying my best to not make this conversation about what do I do with this lethargy or how do I negotiate shitty feelings into ethics or whatever number of questions render this feeling into something more morose and/or political

than it is. It’s now 10 AM and the plastering people have taken to sawing the plaster out of our ceiling. Katey asks if I am OK and I tell her I am fine. She points out that I just cried on my eggs. The transference is starting to happen faster than I can account for.

I feel like a cheap representation of a distraught person. Too emotional, too sensitive, too much. I apologize and tell her I haven’t slept well in a while and am having trouble making sense of things this early in the morning. She stares at me sharply. Your glances are too sharp, that’s a good flavor for a tweet. I more readily generate content when I’m in the cycle. To dull the moment, I start to ask in rapid procession: how was it seeing your boyfriend? How are you feeling about your relationship? Is your practice culminating recently? She doesn’t respond to any of these. She pauses, and asks slowly, you’re dancing the dance, aren’t you?

When we first came up with “dancing the dance,” we were listening to KC & the Sunshine Band’s Boogie Shoes. We were talking about the moment when you’re sitting across from your partner at dinner and realize the mundane nature of the shit situation you’re in.

Your partner won’t look away from his phone for a solid 15 minutes and doesn’t apologize. This minor injustice merges with other stresses to form this muddy feeling that this person doesn’t have the capacity to love you. Rather than give merit to this feeling, and start inappropriately yelling in public, you pocket it hoping that you can transition this negative sensation into a positive sentiment. Katey starts dancing, looking like she’s trying to bastardize John Travolta’s dance sequence in Saturday Night Fever. She’s grinning uncomfortably, gesturing herself into a corner. We’re both hysterically laughing, and swear that we would someday translate this moment into a work.

She nods her head and pulls her phone out of her pocket. Out of the small iPhone speakers, a tinny version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s September starts to play. I start rolling my shoulders, becoming my own momentary John Travolta. She starts to laugh, and tells me about her week. Yea, I’m going through a toughie.

NOT ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT MYSELF

Honesty is Valuable consists of an instruction manual and all the necessary parts to produce a small chair. Inspiration came from Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, particularly the belief that making our objects by hand allows us to develop a closer, more intrinsic relationship with objects and demystify production processes.

Throughout the manual, the user is continually prompted with texts that emphasize the emotive qualities of failure, decor, and taste (or lack thereof). I imagined this pamphlet as a sort of amateur’s-right-to-feeling, in that the chair produced reflected the

maker’s qualities and abilities not in a pejorative way (badly crafted), but rather in a more earnest way. My hopes were that the maker felt an intrinsic connection to the chair they produced, and that this relationship could potentially be formed with other manufactured items. I produced Honesty is Valuable (pamphlet and small batch run) last semester, trying to embody an interest I had in finding oneself in manufactured items. Decorating my apartment while studying Furniture Design allowed me to develop an agency in making and adjusting objects to fulfill the aesthetic needs of my apartment. I never felt this type of agency, as object-making was a mystified process. With Honesty is Valuable, I wanted to communicate this sort of agency to end consumers. The texts that accompanied each direction intended to communicate to the viewer that the capacity to view oneself in an object rendered it a luxury object, not an arts and crafts project. Looking back on this project, this conception of luxury was linked to the anthropomorphic, humanized nature of the chair.

The chair evolved into a projection of the self.

Retrofit’s primary directive was developing a vocabulary for formulating and communicating the self through pre-existing materials. Particularly with the entry hall table, this meant using myself and my own personal narrative (utilizing personal narrative texts direclty in the work). Though in its ideal formulation, Retrofit could operate as a vocabulary of how we can relate to pre-existing materiality. For my next piece, I wanted to explore a retrofit that could be viewed moreso as product than as a self-portrait.

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Initial sketches for the Gutter Chairs. I went back to some of the gutter heat manipulations I had made before and after the first piece, and wanted to focus on their structural capabilities. I was interested in finding a happy medium between engineering the material and being able to quickly crank out simple, humorous ones. In my initial sketches, I still relied on bolting tubes together, but imagined them as showing.

Heat forming samples, partially engineering, partially goop

Bending samples from Tommy Bahama and Andy. Legs looked like pants which I was into. The lapping technique was compelling, but fitting multiple bolts to get rid of racketing didn’t fit well unfortunately.

The most polished of the Gutter Chairs (Ezra) involved a total of six parts -- two legs, bent using a rudimentary jig, a free-bent back, and four cross parts that formed the seating structure. Each part was attached with four 1/4� bolts to keep the piece from racketing.

The whole chair frame bolted together. The tubes that form the seating surface were oversized so they could lap over the edges of the legs, alluding to the older models. Additionally, this reduced the side-toside racketing in the chair frame.

ION IN CONCLUS KS) (HAHA THAN While writing out the ideas that ultimately became Retrofit, it felt like I was trying to pull everything on the planet into this project. Somehow I was going to create a design collection that was deeply political in its privileging of the individual but somehow was universally accessible. None of those things really happened, but still, I must first praise myself. This project at its core emerged from a frustration with the growing disconnect I felt between my actual making practice and a network of thoughts and concepts that were derived both from my studies and my personal life. At the end of last semester, I received a report from a professor saying my work suffered from just not “having faith” in what a design practice could do. This was an apt evaluation, and I long felt tempted to pursue an exclusively writing-based or conceptual practice or something of that flavor.

But while different things come easily to different people, I am a Taurus rising (thus stubborn) and don’t like to think making isn’t for me. In this respect, Retrofit has been a seminal project for me. The work I’ve produced precedes the language I use to make it “good.” The other parts of my practice seep in at parts, but they aren’t there to render my making defensible. I think the intuition with which I approached this project shows in the work, and the disconnect feels considerably smaller. In short, I enjoy having a studio practice now. This complicates my plans for after graduation, but alas.

While I (somewhat) acknowledge its impossibility, I still want to pursue the underlying goals behind Retrofit. Seeing the multiple avenues each piece could have taken, I feel like there’s years of work beyond this moment. The three pieces feel more like a vocabulary of gestures than finalized pieces. They embody linkages between materials and emotional affects, but in their current state they are too sterile. I had the work described to me as self-conscious, and that’s true. In an attempt to render the work universal, I lost a lot of the potential to make this project more deeply personal and/or political. I said this to myself last semester and it seems like I have to continually remind myself – trying to render something more universal tends to become more alienating; people respond to the specificity of narrative. I think there will be moments when restraint will be compelling, but that restraint has to be measured against an outpour.

My second piece, Toughie Console, manages this dynamic most effectively. I think this came from the ways the piece held together irrational associations. I barely questioned any of my decisions in the process, and while the direct articulation of these associations (between text and tarp, exposing vulnerability and exposing construction) isn’t there, their presence is still there.

The third piece, Gutter Chair (Ezra), illustrates my primary issue with the project. I felt crippled with indecision in moving thru this project. Every decision teetered between the chair’s feasibility and its charming qualities. What I got as a result wasn’t a compelling balance of the two, but rather a confusing not-product. I feel as though my aim to render retrofit universal (in a product language) for the third piece emerged from an anxiety to fulfill an archetypal furniture prompt. Seeing how cheap the tubes were, I got excited that maybe I could finally engineer a production item. Like most times I pursue making a product, this made me unenthusiastic about moving forward with the project. Its middle-of-the-road feeling comes from a lack of development, and I think I know how to better tackle this anxiety and self-consciousness.

In closing, I want to reiterate the sentiment from the beginning. I feel that everything could (and should) be developed further. Right now I’m in bed thinking about how to keep producing chairs after graduation. In the twelve-step program of this project, I made 3/4 of a step. But as a sign in my garage says, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a singular degree project.”