The format for this piece is the neoclassic commemorative bronze plaque affixed near the entrance to public buildings. Within this traditional form, the idealized and heroic representation of the human figure comes down to us nearly intact from the graeco-roman sculptural tradition within which it was developed. But here, the body type descends from the sublime to constitute a laboured representation of exhausted determination, of unrelenting conformity to the abstract principles of the work place and the international economic order.

The continuing use of representational figuration in art practice almost always contains its corollary, the affirmative reiteration of gender hierarchies. This work proposes the simultaneous appearance of male and female imagery in mirroric bisymmetrical positions as a corrective to these normative inequities, while retaining the externally imposed hierarchies of economic relations as their overarching formative condition. The straightforward declaration of formal equivalence between the figures, based on gesture and pose, may indicate a way to reimagine the use of the figure in allegoric public work. Its meaning as figurative equivalence then emerges from its contextualization within an already-charged economic sphere; without this proviso figuration collapses back into those predetermined gender relations, with their false declarations of hierarchic normality, that prevail in the global economy.

SCULPTURE
PERFORMANCE DESIGN
MODELS
DRAWINGS
VIDEO
EXHIBITIONS
2001-present
1981-2000
Embodied Fictions
Two Figures
Project for an Office Building
Production of Value
Corner Counter Relief w/AK47
Bijoux
Hypostyle
A Representation...
Work Table with Work
Projection
Pre 1981
Project for an Office
1990, Aluminium, terra cotta, 7'6"' X 12'3"
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