Chicago Artists Month: Interview
I clicked away on my camera as Ted Harris wove through his large, high-ceilinged West Side warehouse studio stacked bottom to top with musty, junk-like matter. “Photographers love the clutter,” he grinned. The warehouse featured an open-door crawl this past Sunday, inviting in the public to a free show of the latest work of the artists who live there. The crawl was part of a series of Art Walks for Chicago Artists Month. Harris, the Chicago-based lighting designer who created the dining room chandelier from used Harley Davidson motorcycle parts and the recycled lightbulb fixture for the MSI Smart Home Exhibit, cleaned up his studio for the event. (Check back soon for before-and-after pictures. For those of you who keep up with us, this is Part II of the article featured here.)
He’s known to everyone he meets as ‘the lightbulb guy’. Parents, friends and neighbors will collect used parts and bulbs in bags for the next time he stops by. Harris started out in commercial advertising, designing ads and illustrations for McDonald’s and Suave, among others. He later switched into lighting as a hobby when he moved into a house in which he decided to make everything. “Everything … should be filled with lightbulbs,” he says. I asked what inspired him, and, simply put, the answer was ‘everything’. It may begin with a certain spring or lightbulb, but “one idea begets the next idea, ” says Harris. “Fortunately, it keeps coming.” This partially explains Harris’s versatility — he repaints and repurposes lamps, but has also taken on larger projects such as antiquing kitchens.
From used shot glasses to mink hats to heavy duty rope, Harris’s work is transforming junk into art. Although green has become a fad and using recycled materials has become a “thing to do,” for Harris it’s always been simply a cheap and sensible way of creating. There is beauty in discarded things, he says, and “You can make lights out of anything. I like to think everyone can afford it.”
“Is there a struggle between producing the work people will buy and producing the work you like?” I asked. He replied, “You [have to] do what you want because you don’t get to do what you want often enough . . . A lot of people don’t get the beauty of [a lot of my work]. And I don’t care. I like it.” But often enough, he says, “People trust what you like, that’s why they like what you do.”
Favorite artists, one living, one dead – go.
Living: Chuck Close, painter
Dead: Jasper Johns … “I think he’s dead,” says Harris. (He’s actually still living … but we’ll let it slide.)
Harris’s fixtures are known to trickle on to Scout after shows and exhibits, at 5221 N. Clark St., 773-275-5700. Or you can call Harris at 773-332-1001.
The next and last even for Chicago Artists Month is the Artists at Work Forum on Thursday, October 29 at 6 pm at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington Street, followed by an after party at the Hard Rock Hotel. Visit www.studiochicago.org for more information.
