Steven Muller and Jared Abner
Wood Play
01. Line Drawing # 14 Recliner, 2021, hand split firewood, 26h x 22w x 3d inches, $850.00
02. Line Drawing #10 Round Table (Half Round/Three Legs), 2021, hand split firewood, 17h x 17w x 7d inches, $350.00
03. Woven Back #51, 2021, hand split firewood, 27h x 20w x 16d inches, $700.00
04. Line Drawing #11 Dildo Chair #2, 2021, hand split firewood, 28h x18w x17d inches, $850.00
05. Line Drawing #6 Corner Chair, 2021, hand split firewood, 28h x 15w x 12d inches, $800.00
06. Walnut Chair #52, 2021, hand split firewood, 16h x 15w x 12d inches, $500.00
07. Line Drawing #1 Deconstructed Chair, 2021, hand split firewood, 48h x 20w x 15d inches, $850.00
08. Line Drawing #5 Dildo Chair, 2021, hand split firewood, 42h x 14w x 16d inches, $850.00
09. Line Drawing #2 Corner Ladder Back, 2021, hand split firewood, 44h x 13w x 14d inches, $850.00
10. Line Drawing #54, 2020, hand split firewood, 24h x 19w x 16d inches, $650.00
11. Line Drawing #55, 2021 , hand split firewood, 20h x 13w x 6d inches, $300.00
12. Line Drawing #56, 2021, hand split firewood, 18h x 16w x 8d inches, $650.00
13. Folding Chair, 2021, hand split firewood
14. Side View #53, 2020, hand split firewood, 27h x 19w x 4.5d inches, $550.00
15. Line Drawing #57, 2020, hand split firewood, 16h x 16w x 6d inches, $650.00
16. Line Drawing #7 Desk Chair (Floating Arm), 2021, hand split firewood, 29h x 16w x 17d inches, $800.00
17. Line Drawing #4 Vermont Chair, 2021, hand split firewood, 30h x 16w x 14d inches, $850.00
18. Line Drawing #3 Through The Wall, 2021, hand split firewood, 31h x 22w x14d inches, $400.00
Jared Abner (floor)
19. Suspension Four, 2021, walnut wood, 71h x 15.5w x 21d inches, $4000.00
20. Cork Screwy Thing, 2021, bass wood and steel, 25.5h x 9w x 15d inches, $1900.00
21. Suspension Two, 2020, ash wood, poplar wood, milk paint, steel, 51h x 21w x 9d inches, $2000.00
22. Suspension Three, 2021, cherry wood, 55h x 29w x 23d inches, $4000.00
23. Bench, 2020, walnut wood, fiber rush, 30h x 62w x 21d, $5000.00
24. Tilia Americana Seven, 2021, bass wood and steel, 11.75h x 7.25w x 7.5d inches, $1200.00
25. Tilia Americana Six, 2021, bass wood, 12h x 6.5w x 5.5d inches, $600.00
26. Suspension Five, 2021, cherry wood and steel, 90h x 60w x 60d inches, $7000.00
27. Tilia Americana Three, 2021, bass wood, 11h x 4.5w x 5d inches, $600.00
Line Drawing.
Line Drawing with wood.
Pandemic influenced. Materials.
Steven Muller
Ok, so there is this story I have told numerous times, Pandemic-related, installing a mailbox down the road for the first time ever for mail delivery in New Hampshire, summer home and summer studio location. Due to the Pandemic, I left Boston. The block of wood I was using to prevent the stake I was trying to drive into the ground from getting mangled, broke up into all these neat little pieces, lines. This was the beginning of my line drawings. Materials.
Chairs: Ok, I’m going back three or four years, I stood in the New Hampshire studio and was thinking about chairs, small wooden abstract chairs. I guess it takes time for these things to manifest themselves. Honestly, I had forgotten all about it until halfway through this summer, and I was looking around at all the work I had previously made, and it revolves around furniture. Chairs, tables, influenced from advertising on Facebook, scenes from the local dump, posts from friends who bought chairs and re-finished them.
Line Drawing: Lines. So I go out to the wood pile, woodstove-bound split logs and I study them, trying see what would happen if I split them into the lines I am looking for. I choose Maple, hard wood. I sit on a stool in the studio with a chisel, hammer and pry bar and rescue my lines from certain death in the woodstove.
Fun: I have been told that this is the word I use the most to describe my current work in the studio, this work, the line drawings. I do love it, so much fun, studying logs, splitting sticks from the logs, studying it all, the assembling, the deviations from start to finish, where I start off and where I end. How the work hangs and then the shadows that it casts. Fun. So much fun.
Biography
Steven Muller is an established Boston-based artist who also works from his studio in New Hampshire. He has shown extensively throughout New England and in New York City. He has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) regional grant through the Mass Cultural Council. His work is in many private collections. Additionally, his work is in the collection of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art in New York City.
Muller uses rough-cut split maple from his woodpile for his line drawings. Partly getting his inspiration from the wood itself, he works from abstraction to more identifiable chair and table line drawings.
In addition to working on the line drawings, which started in 2002, Muller has been working on hand-altered photographs he refers to as Ink Jet Reductions, multi-layered and printed large scale photographs that are drawn on and into, then chemically altered.
He has curated multiple exhibitions at his Street Gallery at 259 A Street and at the Gallery at 249, both in Boston.
Working with Wood
Jared Abner
When I was six, I started spending time in the basement. On top of an old workbench, there was a rusty hammer, and behind it was a carpenter’s hand saw hanging from pegboard. As soon as I was tall enough to reach them, I started using the saw to cut through whatever scrap wood I could find lying around and using the hammer to nail them together. I never started with a plan as to what sort of object I was going to make. Instead, I was doing something much more productive: playing, or perhaps, more accurately, exploring. Using the hammer and the saw, experimenting with the properties of wood, the same material that, even today, fifteen years later, I am still curious about. Today, this playtime results in sculpture, with the exact same excitement I had as when I was six.
Simply put, my work is about subtraction and addition. First, I subtract the raw material by turning, carving, and cutting away at it. Then, I put the pieces together again in a new way. I go through this process of creation through destruction, playing just like a little kid cutting something with a saw.
Biography
Jared Abner is a 2021 graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology’s furniture design program where he earned a BFA in Sculpture. While at RIT, Jared was introduced to the imaginative furniture and sculpture of his professor, Andy Buck. Buck’s work inspired Jared to play and explore the medium of wood and the contingencies of his tools. Jared continues this exploration in his Boston-based studio.