Would you like to wait here in the sitting room or sit here in the waiting room? – Firesign Theatre
We spend a considerable chunk of our existence(s) sitting and waiting, waiting for doctors, lawyers, clients, (potential) employers, jury foremen, auto repairmen, planes, trains, restaurant seats, ad infinitum. Why do we dread such down time? Because everything about the spaces in which we wait reinforces our sense of suspension, our sense of lost time, our sense that, no matter what work or reading we manage to accomplish in these interstices, we are doing nothing but aging. We sit in waiting rooms.
Cynthia Wylie would have us wait in sitting rooms. She re-Imagines the transitional space as a welcoming locus, a warm and lively-looking environment whose smart and charming details are boldly described and, ultimately, reassuring, reintroducing natural forces otherwise conspicuous by their absence. It doesn’t matter whether these handsome prints and delicate images define a public or a private room; they enliven the domestic setting no less than the common.
And, of course, these apparitions do not confine themselves to the walls. They climb down and insinuate themselves about and beside us, inflecting the objects that might surround us. Together they propose a gracious atmosphere, a lucid and unified “through-composition” that satisfies the intellect with its coherence even as it gratifies the senses with its sober beauty.
Wylie’s approach to design – her dedication to an integrated approach to interior elaboration no less than her complex but highly ordered and carefully stylized “language of form” – harks back to concepts and styles we regard as from a much different time and place. But, if we know that the decorous yet sensuous approaches of Art Nouveau, the Craftsman style, and the Wiener Werkststätte – not to mention their progeny, including Art Deco and the Bauhaus – are the day-before-yesterday’s avant garde, we find that the spirit, and even the manner(s), they unleashed upon a thirsty world a century ago not only remain fresh, but quench the same thirst now. Everything old is new again – and not a moment too soon.
One thing Wylie does that inherits so directly from high-Modernist hip is work and think as an artist and as a designer at the same time. She balances expressive impulse with imagined task, so that decorative detail re-imagines but grows directly out of delicately rendered image. The logic suffuses all the visual stimulation she provides us in her sitting-room concept(s). Each of her trees is at once a presence in and of itself and a source of attractively stylized symbolism. Each tree is not simply a unique figure, but a unique fount of genial heraldry. The pictures and the designs don’t simply talk to one another, they grow out of and elucidate one another. Meaning, balance, symmetric relation pervades these room-proposals.
Who wouldn’t want to sit here? Who would mind waiting here? Who would even want to leave? We wouldn’t fall asleep in such vivacious surroundings, but we wouldn’t be so damned eager to flee them, either. We would move onto our appointments with a certain regret, to be sure, but with refreshed purpose and sense of centeredness. And if we were entertaining or being entertained at home, we would indeed be entertained.
Call it win-win Werkstätte. Cynthia Wylie has rescued and renewed the transitional space, allowing us precisely the happy transit we need.
Peter Frank
Los Angeles
September 2010
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