The Scopophilia Chair by Fiona Roberts
Australian designer, Fiona Roberts, has created a chair upholstered in lush red velvet with 300 plastic eyeballs. The chair is called “Scopophilia,” or “the love of looking,” and it is “the phobic object of a subject suffering from its antithesis, scopophobia, the fear of being looked at.
Roberts says of the design:
A chair is designed to fit, comfort and support the body, but the ‘Scopophilia’ chair no longer possesses some of these functions, although from a distance it appears to offer them. Alternately, the form of the chair is reminiscent of an open-armed hug that invites the viewer into its ‘caress’.
Roberts is just 24 and she’s already the winner of the Hill-Smith Gallery/Helpmann Academy Friends Award, as well as the People’s Choice Award at her graduate exhibition. She plans to spend the prize money touring European medical/science museums* with a California-based blogger/documentarian who is also fond of such establishments.
* Part of this sentence is not true.
Click through for more Scopophilia, plus a new musical pairing that I bet you can guess!
The Scopophilia chair is living up to its name: it’s been featured on the covers of a couple Aussie magazines and it even adorns a bus shelter. (Imagine if Kaws tried to hit this poster like he used to do with bus stop adverts back in the day. He’d have to draw X’s over all those eyes!)
Roberts dissects people’s reactions to the Scopophilia chair:
It’s got push and pull. You know its function, and that you should sit in it, but it doesn’t look like a very comfortable proposition…Some people are horrified, [but] I like the serious and the humorous nature of having fears; not really trusting yourself, your surroundings and your body. That’s my number one focus – the body and how it can corrupt everything and ruin everything and can be so deceitful and hide things that can ruin your life like cancer and tumours and all those horrible things. It’s all about deceit and concealment and all that wonderful stuff.
Wonderful stuff, indeed! This post is dedicated to Kyle Nelson, whose “chaetophobia” (or fear of hair) prevented him from enjoying my recent story about Giorgia Zanellato and her hair combs made of human hair. I hope you, Kyle, have enjoyed this story more.
