Trout Gallery

In 2006, I made a body of work specifically about the concept of negotiation. This group of sculptures and drawings were shown in Berlin, Germany. In the catalogue for the show, Pamela Franks, Deputy Director of Collections and Education at the Yale University Art Gallery, provided the viewer with a pathway for interpreting the work.

“The genesis of the composition… in these sculptures was a single semicircle with short horizontal elements at either end suggesting platforms for some further exchange. This formal starting point, a two–ended game of balance, is a direct manifestation of the artist’s central conceptual preoccupation in this body of work: the idea of negotiation. The two seats of communication are balanced at either end of a connector that paradoxically keeps the positions apart….The accumulation of individual connecting elements into the overall composition suggests a constellation of relationships with all the negotiable bends and turns, and made or missed connections, of human discourse.”

As I took a fresh look at the idea of negotiation, I realized that many of my sculptures reflected a subtle preoccupation with this concept. This show pulls together a broader body of work that considers the many ways that we negotiate.  There are pieces from twenty years ago as well as newly developed work.  I have used the materiality of the objects to explore the possibility of a larger narrative. I like to think that, through this work, there is an imaginary space between complexity and certainty that establishes a negotiation between objects.