Chairity Case – A Personal Project about Chairs
Ever notice how many chairs you see lining the streets on garbage day? Ever wonder where the other chairs in the set are? Do you ask yourself how anybody could ever throw away such a lovely piece of furniture? Or do you find yourself having to resist dragging home every chair you find? Well I did (too?) and so this project was born!
The purpose? To showcase the beauty of every chair…….. and help reduce the number I feel compelled to lug home after a night out at the bar.
~ Exert from: A Safe Place for Chairs.
Ohh the chair blog. A personal project of mine that had many people wonder if I was a little bit nuts. How did it start? Well not unlike the description above.
I had just moved back to Canada after working in California as a Graphic Designer for almost two and a half years, and found an apartment in the cute area of Toronto called Little Italy. While in California I had lived in the beach town made famous by the soap opera of the same name, Santa Barbara. Anyone who has been there before can attest to the homogeneity of all the buildings and houses with their white stucco walls and red tiled roofs. There’s no doubt it’s a breathtaking city. But after over two years of feeling more than a little out of place in the perfectly groomed town with its equally manicured inhabitants, I found Little Italy refreshing.
I love how this is one of many cozy, safe and affordable neighbourhoods right smack-dab in the middle of downtown Toronto. Having traveled a lot, this is a rare quality in a city. Most downtowns are almost completely made up of hi-rises, office buildings and condos, but in Toronto residents have the option of living in a house within walking distance to their work. In Little Italy, each house has it’s own character, thanks to its mix of families, Italian & Portuguese seniors, business people, and hipsters. It’s truly eclectic. But what’s even more interesting is the frequency in which I’d find chairs left out on the curb to be picked up. Having scored an apartment with a balcony, chairs were a hot commodity for me and some of the chairs I saved from the dump were absolutely gorgeous.
Only… it got to the point where my balcony was so full with chairs that when I discovered new gems I literally had to chant in my head “Don’t take it, don’t take it, don’t take it” so that I wouldn’t. Luckily I always carry my trusty camera with me in my bag, so when I couldn’t justify yet another awkward walk home holding a rusted, half-broken chair, a picture would suffice. I came to love these pictures and my imagination went wild. I started thinking up the dream situation for the chair and the situation that caused them to get thrown out. These abandoned chairs came alive in my mind so I wanted them to come alive on screen.
I started by writing stories for each chair and then decided it would be more fun to give each personified chair its dream situation via drawings that animate. “Chairity Case” was created to house these stories and videos, although I only got around to animating two. See them here.
I loved the video idea, but I also wanted to work in my love for design. My collection of chair photos was growing more and more each day and I was eager to post as many as I could while still putting them in the beautiful setting they deserved. The result was a kind-of photoshop collage as in the photo at the top of this post. More can be seen here on Chairity Case’s sister blog “A Safe Place for Chairs.”
My chair project made me happy! It was a fun collection that didn’t require any space or money and was a little something I could do to feel creative and connected to my neighbourhood. It also gave me something to do when I moved to London, England and was reminded once again, how hard it is to find friends and a job in another country. Without the chair blog I would have felt completely depressed sitting in the basement of my dark flat (who would have thought it gets dark here at 3pm in the winter??), slowly going broke (London being expensive is not a stereotype), wondering why I had moved to another country yet again…
Then a friend sent me this article by Ellen Moorhouse.
http://www.yourhome.ca/homes/green/article/844457–trash-talk-forsaken-chairs-find-virtual-home
As the Brits say, I was gutted. Some guy had taken away some of my glory with the click of his iPhone.
