Little Assemblies
left to right

Beast with Two Backs, 2009
Transparencies, wood, empty bottles, screen print, post card.

Financial Relation, 2009
Digital print, shipping pallet, industrial gold glitter.

FT, 2008
Digital print and Epson paper packaging.

Beast with Two Backs is a heterogeneous ensemble constructed from two rough wooden pallets, joined to make a shelf, and two digital prints on transparent film. An image of a man or woman in a long coat, back turned toward the camera, is printed onto the film covering the two faces of the wooden support. The prints restrict access to the shelves of the structure but are transparent, allowing one to see the objects resting inside: two empty bottles of beer, a rolled print, and an old postcard depicting the Austrian military uniform worn by Napoleon Bonaparte when he was exiled to the island of Elba. The assemblage is a kind of rebus, a grouping of clues lacking a single code. What does an empty bottle of Rogue beer have to do with a postcard showing the empty uniform of a failed conqueror? Is this object the marker of a rogue statesman run amok, used up, and shipped overseas? Why this collection of empties? Where do we enter the work? The History Channel would never turn its back on us like this.

Financial Relation is a standard 48 x 40" shipping pallet partially coated in a mixture of gold glitter and resin, a greenish digital print of a standard 12-inch ruler surrounded by a checkered grid rests on its surface. The image of the ruler is enlarged to just over 17 inches. The print emblematizes a separation of scale from all physical determinants. Paradoxically, the ruler’s standard size is undermined through its re-standardization as coded information in a digital format. One could understand the digital print as merely one in a potentially infinite series of products whose ideal form exists as information stored somewhere else and translatable onto virtually any surface.