Ellefson’s work hails back to start of district
Can a sofa be art? A chair? A coffee table?
Clark Ellefson, Vista founder and accomplished furniture artist, doesn’t see any way that they couldn’t be. In his Lewis Clark workshop, he’s spent over 30 years working on furniture art, a field that’s a mixture of form and function.
“If your concept of furniture is what you see in furniture stores, then my furniture’s unique,” Ellefson said. “It has more color, texture, playful elements, sometimes they even embody concepts.”
Ellefson,who graduated from USC with a degree in fine arts, got his start in a more abstract field than furniture art.
“My interest was in sculpture, but sculpture doesn’t sell very quickly,” he explained. “I needed a way to support it. I worked at the art commission for about three years and then decided to go out on my own and do carpentry work to support my sculptures.”
Around the time Ellefson and woodworking partner Jim Lewis started their carpentry shop in the 80s, the Memphis Movement was in full swing.
“It’s an Italian group that started doing this crazy furniture,” he said of the Memphis Movement. “Their furniture was described as ‘postmodern’ at the time. It was very colorful where they clashed patterns, shapes, very lively, and I liked it. At the same time I was going ‘I’m doing the woodworking to support sculpture, maybe I just need to make furniture and push them all together.’ And that’s what I did, I took the energy from my sculpture and I put it into furniture.”
In addition to being one of the area’s foremost furniture artists, Ellefson has a rich history with the Vista district.
“I’m kind of one of the pioneers,” he said. “I moved my studio here in 1980, up on Lincoln Street, and then it was the wrong side of the tracks. Old deserted warehouse buildings … train still ran through there!”
While most of his friends were working, or struggling to work, in New York City, Ellefson turned his eye towards fixing up that wrong side of the tracks.
“I liked the scene up there, SoHo and all these old buildings, and I thought ‘we can do that here,’” he said. “We’ll rent this big old building, set up a shop, we’ll invite our other artist friends in. We’ll have this little conclave of people … and then we’d throw big parties in warehouse.”
It’s Ellefson’s belief that the Vista has been a very important part of Columbia’s growth.
“We created all of this energy. We started up art galleries, so we created this rambunctious activity around art, making things, which helped develop the neighborhood,” he said. “Columbia has finally recognized the role artists play in building a better city.”
Ellefson is still at work in his studio and as a Member at Large in the Vista Board of Directors, trying to “keep artists in the Vista and keep that creative energy here.” In addition to his continued work tending to the growth of the Vista, he’s been branching out his furniture art into a lamp series.
“I’m more focused on lighting right now,” he said. “Light is such an interesting medium, it’s very malleable.”
It goes to show that even the functional furniture art industry still has plenty of room for innovation.
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