Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

'Face the Jury'

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published May 10, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Sometimes, Dr. Freud, a chair is more than a chair.

As is the case with 13 lipstick-red steel chairs recently plopped on to the grassy swath of land next to the St. Petersburg Judicial Building at the corner of Mirror Lake Drive and Fifth Street N.

Titled Face the Jury , the installation is a $90,000 public arts project, paid for by Pinellas County, and created by Boston artist Douglas Kornfeld.

It's a witty, whimsical homage to that most democratic institution, trial by a 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-ton concrete 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 10 feet. Each is individually designed in shapes ranging from severely angled to eccentrically rounded, representing the diversity of the people who serve on juries.

Near the sidewalk, a humanly proportioned chair, simpler than the others, is 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 single color, a bright red, unifies the quirky assemblage of forms.

[Last modified May 10, 2006, 22:04:19]