It was seeing a George Nakashima settee, “with spindles to one side and a slab seat running wild,” that lit the fuse for Eric Cannizzaro’s double Windsor. In Cannizzaro’s piece a curving redwood plank, cut from a tree that endured a fire, yokes together two fanback chairs in the style of his mentor, Curtis Buchanan. It also links Olympia, Wash., Cannizzaro’s college town, where he received the redwood plank as a gift and built the double chair’s undercarriage, to Jonesborough, Tenn., where he completed the piece in Buchanan’s shop and where he aims to move next. Other dualities and dissonances abound in the piece, pairing as it does symmetry with asymmetry, refined historical forms with untamed natural ones, and painted parts whose grain is hidden with a clear-finished seat “where you can see the tree.”

—Jonathan Binzen

Photo: Robert Batey