Showing contingency as well as contradiction is part of her method. This is apparent in the construction of the works—in her various techniques of casting, molding, carving and joining, and in her formal language of bends, droops, arcs and blobs.
Each original piece was either reduced to its bare structure or cursorily exaggerated like shapes in a dream. The colors were inverted and shadows solidified, using logics of memory and afterimage. The reimagined work felt improvisational and playful: a tiger skin rug was replaced by a chalk outline. How can a work be not like itself?
Their co-existence relied on a micron of autonomy. Her complex bargains of levity and gravity, her insertion of multiple, contradictory vantages, and the almost animistic drive her work seems to have toward formal evolution, are always in service of the subtle body of sculpture rather than the human body of mind and heart. Baghramian is conscious of display, always bringing it into the work. Frames, struts, stands or other supportive or interruptive apparatuses are often part of the grouping of a work.
Sometimes the rigid or sharp or generally unyielding metal that otherwise plays a remedial role is left alone to make a structure, as in Scruff of the Neck : bare, arcing lines of polished aluminum or steel intersect with one another and the wall.
They leave the mind nowhere to hide. Except in the titles, which are also lacerating in some instinctual way. What looks organic is really hard, cast silicone. Baghramian works with context, not influence. She is interested in figuring difference, in making work that edges ever closer to what sculpture really is for her—a way of putting things together heterogeneously—somewhere between the audience and the object. This third body again.
