Work is Paean to Democracy

May 10, 2006
By Lennie Bennett, St Petersburg Times Art Critic, Photo by: Cherie Diez

St Petersburg - Sometimes, Dr Freud, a chair is more than a chair. As is the case with 13 lipstick-red steel chairs recently plopped onto the grassy swath next to the St Petersburg Judicial Center Building at Mirror Lake Drive and Fifth Street N

Titled  Face the Jury, the installation is a $90,000 public arts project, paid for by Pinellas Count, and Created by Boston Artist Douglas Kornfeld.

It’s a witty, whimsical homage to that most democratic institution, trial by jury of your peers. And, like the jury system, it is participatory.

“I hope people climb all over them,” said Kornfeld, as 350 cubic yards of soil was mounded around the 2-tonconcrete bases that will be covered with sod by Friday, making them impervious to hurricane-force winds or energetic children.

Face the jury works as entertainment and bright idea. Twelve of the chairs are monumentally sized and seem even larger on their hilly perches, rising as high as ten feet. Each is individually designed in shapes ranging from severely angled to eccentrically rounded, representing the diversity of jurors. Near the sidewalk, a simple, humanly proportioned chair at ground level. Sit in it and you are metaphorically acting as a witness to the process.
Kornfeld says the grouping is based on his experience as a juror. “It was a civil trial,  and our first vote was a seven-to-five split.”
So he arranged seven in closer relationship to each other and strewed the five other chairs farther afield. The color red unifies the quirky assemblage.

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