PRINTBreak on through
Chris Teeter’s artwork opens doors
Bharat Choudhary
Chris Teeter’s collection of 16 doors brings its own ambience to Columbia’s Orr Street Studios. A 17th door was in the works, but it didn’t mesh with the rest of the collection, so it was scrapped.
May 20, 2009 | 12:00 p.m. CST
It’s 3 p.m., and Chris Teeter’s office is a hot mess. In his disheveled white studio, rusty metal clamors for attention against tape measures, saws and screws — all of it chaotic. It’s like being backstage at Tool Time, the combined clutter adding at least five degrees to the cramped room.
“You have my permission to kill that gnat,” he says, waving his own arms precariously close to his face.
Here, both Teeter’s life and art take three dimensions. In this building to the left of Orr Street Studios (though at the time he had the run of the entire warehouse), Teeter created his largest project to date after Mark Timberlake, the brains behind the art studio, saw a PS: Gallery show of Teeter’s smaller sculptures in 2006. The task Timberlake set — to design and create the 16 6-by-9-foot doors that open into the artist workstations at Orr Street Studios — was a wake-up call.
“Maybe at some time in my life I would have thought, ‘I can’t do that. It’s too big, and I don’t have a place to work or the tools for that,’” Teeter says. “My greatest achievement would be convincing myself that I’m an artist because that’s really what I am.”
Each of the 16 doors, installed with the help of a crane in January 2007, centers on artists and art, an appropriate focus for a man whose modesty and his tendency to talk about art in the third person make him a kind of representative of the genre. “I just kind of look at it as a brotherhood, of which I am a member,” Teeter says. To reduce costs, Teeter used mainly recycled materials scavenged from trash and old warehouses. But he needed a plan.
“Some people work like that, but I don’t,” Teeter says. “Structurally, I had to plan them — dimension, support, everything — but creatively I didn’t plan anything. That’s just where the fun is, in getting a bunch of stuff together and not having the slightest idea what you’re going to do.”
Teeter’s creative strength was challenged by a since-destroyed project that attempted to address children in his art — what he calls “the seventeenth door.” But Teeter didn’t love it. “In the end, I thought, ‘This doesn’t fit in with what I want to do,’ so I said ‘The hell with it,’” he says. “‘I’ll throw it away.’”
His work, completed in weeklong chunks over six months, provides an artistic identity to the building without sacrificing its focus. When opened, the doors slide into the walls to hide Teeter’s work and showcase the artists’. Orr Street Studios is located one block east of Tenth and north of Walnut and is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 3 p.m.
“Each door is kind of its own world, and people get to walk from world to world,” says Elaine Johnson, director of Orr Street Studios. “Without the doors, the space would still be usable, but it wouldn’t be inviting. I say that even without people there, I’m still in good company.”
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