Side Chair c. 1937

Editor: This is "Side Chair," created around 1937 by Edna C. Rex. It's a coloured-pencil drawing. The image gives me this almost dreamlike quality with how carefully the details are rendered. What catches your eye when you look at this work? Curator: It's the chair's *presence*, isn't it? It's both incredibly ordinary – we all know chairs – and yet imbued with a quiet dignity. I imagine Edna C. Rex observing it, perhaps over many hours, seeing not just an object, but a silent character with its own story etched in the details of the wood and fabric. And that's realism, of a kind. A soft focus on lived-in reality. Have you noticed how the chair almost floats against the ground? Editor: It does seem to lack weight somehow! Maybe it's the simplicity of the background. I find the patterns on the chair so intricate and ornate. Is that detail something Rex was going for, to have this really decorative focus against a plain backdrop? Curator: Precisely! It's almost as if the background serves as a stage, allowing the chair's "performance" to take centre stage, a celebration of the beauty in everyday design. We see how light falls, how fabric wrinkles. Imagine her considering all those things when rendering them, seeing her own experiences layered into those curves. You know? Editor: It feels very personal, as if Rex had an emotional connection with this particular chair. Curator: Yes! And perhaps it becomes a vessel for *our* emotions too, now we can all pause and imagine what the experience was to *live* with that very kind of furniture in 1937, with someone seeing how we would interact and touch these materials every day. It's a ghost imprint in time. Editor: I didn't think I'd get so philosophical over a drawing of a chair! But seeing it as Rex saw it is fascinating. Curator: Isn’t it? Art helps us not just *see*, but *feel* the passage of time, rendered in the subtlest of details and that almost feels magic.