Artist Statement
By participating in a conflation of economies through art, my work theatricalizes the cultural processes for visually communicating subjectivity. In my approach to artmaking, I construct instances in which deeply intimate, autobiographical matter meets the rhythm of Capital.


Image 1, 2, 3, 4:
Secrétaire (2010) is a series of works that reflect on the dual meaning of the French word ‘secrétaire’ – the unit of furniture occupied by an employee assigned to carry out administrative tasks, and the desk’s occupant. Starting with this homonym I propose deviations of the work desk in sculptures imprinted with graphic information. The desks are nonfunctional structures whose administrative purpose has been interrupted, foregrounding the project’s process of development and my fragmented, dualistic activity as an artist and gallerist at Reena Spaulings, New York. The decorative facades hint at the promise, or illusion, of glamour as an elusive form of payment for cultural labor. The printed panels are not only parts that form a recognizable piece of furniture, but carriers of a workforce narrative that questions the desk’s history and use, as well as the use or usefulness of the secretary herself. As a textual component, I am working on a publication that investigates labor in the cultural field and the lifestyles that have arisen through the feminization of the workplace.


Image 5, 6, 7:

Wish you were her (2011) is a series of ikebana floral arrangements created for a solo presentation at Art Basel. One of my interests in ikebana is how seemingly universal material, namely flowers, can radically shift in meaning according to how it is contextualized by a signifying economy, whether used as garish décor or as surrogates for profound human experiences. By working with ikebana masters, I am engaging ikebana as a three-dimensional figurative art with temporal and spatial attributes relating to Modernist paradigms in contemporary art. To confront the market-driven art fair context in which the ikebana works were asked to participate, I commissioned an ikebana artisan to collaborate with the chief floral designer at Les Trois Rois, Basel, the luxury hotel for the artworld elite and my hosting gallery. Incorporated into my ikebana arrangements were flowers ordered for private rooms and exclusive dinners thrown by blue chip dealers. The title ‘Wish you were her’ alludes to a Freudian slip intended to say “wish you were here”. Perhaps an SMS message to a partner back home during a tryst in a private suite, the ‘private’ flowers appearing publicly in these works do not give away their origin, unless of course you happened to be a guest in the room or at the table. The work plays with access and accessibility in both the aesthetic and social sense. By combining flowers that were picked on meditative walks in nature for their humble, minimalist aesthetic with those ordered to impress (as is typical of overflowing Western bouquets), my work focuses on the interruption of sign value, formal and figurative infidelity, textual betrayal, the vanity of appearance and the swapping of privacy and publicity. The project was introduced by an invitation in the form of a business card to view fresh cut flowers daily.


Image 8:
Ancora tu / You again (2011) is a work-in-progress that transposes the gift economy onto the ardent, triangulated relationship between artist, dealer and collector. I was invited by a collector/client/friend to create an artwork using his industrial enterprise – marble production. In exchange for the use of his resources, he would be given an edition of the artwork, or an artwork from my oeuvre of his choosing. By fusing his patronage with my own purchase of readymade luxury jewelry in a sculptural artwork (jewelry paid for by my representing gallery), I am examining how natural resources such as stone and metal are transformed into sentimental objects sold and bartered for worth and affection. By testing a hierarchy of materials and strategies, I hope to challenge some double standards used to categorize ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ art production. Primarily, I am looking at how value fluctuates from the position of the one giving, or the one receiving.


Image 9, 10, 11, 12:
what’s his face (2011) is a series of ikebana arrangements made according to the loose tenets of the Sogetsu school which believes that ‘ikebana can be made anywhere by anyone using any materials’. For the month-long exhibition at Bortolami, New York, the arrangement was changed regularly to follow an essential ikebana rule that arrangements should only be seen when flowers are at their freshest, most vigorous stage of life, and at no other time. The only constants in this piece are the glass ‘top hat’ vase out of which a new bouquet appears before the previous one expires, and the work’s title that represses a given name. With this work, I am reading one visual economy (ikebana, Eastern, traditional) through another (contemporary art, Western, postmodern). I have chosen to work with ikebana for its abstract and poetic qualities, but most affectingly to experience what it means to use materials you meet “only once in a lifetime”.


Image 13:

Skirt (2010) is part of a project realized for the Swiss Institute, New York in which I fabricated a singular silk garment made from a textile I designed with a fashion manufacturer. The tailoring for ‘Skirt’ references an iconic Prada skirt with its pattern of repeating lips from a Man Ray photograph. The repeating jade-green motif of my pattern is the image, in actual scale, of a drink coaster from the distinguished Zurich bar, Kronenhalle. As a gesture of cultural exchange, for the duration of my New York show, one could visit the Kronenhalle in Zurich and order a cocktail named ‘Tommy Rowles’ after the bartender who invented it and still mixes it at Bemelman’s Bar at The Carlyle Hotel, New York. It is of no great significance to the artwork that Tommy Rowles was my next-door neighbor while growing up in New York, but rather that his recipe is being interpreted, distributed and consumed through other social channels. ‘Skirt’ was created as a transient piece to be worn and was therefore absent from the gallery, but active on the body. Instead, the work on view at SI was a limited-edition invitation card announcing the cocktail’s offering at the parallel bars during the show’s run. My artistic gesture was to avoid installing artwork in the Swiss Institute’s lobby to which I was assigned, but rather to redirect visitors to an experience elsewhere in the city. Louise Lawler’s ‘Invitation to Swan Lake’ was an inspiration.


Image 14, 15, 16, 17, 18:

The Beatrix In (2009) is a body of work created for Kunsthalle Zurich. The works are narratively woven together by a text I wrote as a key to the project. The text is a first person monologue of juxtaposed quotations by cultural producers of both genders discussing aesthetics, politics and structures of success. As the voice shifts from male to female, the narrator’s sex remains ambiguous. With the multilayered artworks, I problematize constructs of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ artmaking and explore how formal tropes and signifiers gain currency from a gendered position. In making paintings with textiles, I turned to the manufacturing processes of the fashion industry, a field often pegged as ‘female’, although female designers are a minority. The repetition of the ‘dot-drip’ motif is a theatrical play on the gestures of the heroic abstract painter. In ‘Standing O’, the drip has painted itself into a monochrome object in the shape of its own self-irony.


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These works first appeared in a solo exhibition titled Cherchez La Ghost at New Jerseyy, Basel in 2009. In the series ‘Untitled (Luxury Problems)’ (2009), the current season’s silk garment is digitally enlarged and selectively printed onto commercial signage material. Though the garment is instantaneously consumable ‘in stores now’, its pattern possesses a familiar, present-day swagger that retains the ‘phenomenon of distance’ in its appearance. With weave and thread ink jetted onto PVC billboard media, ‘Untitled (Luxury Problems)’ is a cultish, multihued patchwork whose singular motif is the image of the cloth’s fabrication from mill to pixelled screen and back. Modern computing and its forerunner the programmable loom meet on a plane where the image renders transmissibility visible. ‘Infinite Sign (2009)’ is a series of aluminum wall pieces mimicking an ornament found above the entrance to the gallery. A floating form without function, it most likely was used to hang advertisements in the 1930’s, the date of the building’s construction. Cut by computer-guided water jet and given a mirror finish, ‘Infinite Sign’ is a cold shadow of its referent.