Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers

On view through July 28, 2008 at SculptureCenter

Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers focuses on work by women artists who made significant contributions to the development of sculptural practice in the 1970s. They explored the formal constructs of Post-Minimalism: altering notions of sculptural scale, introducing non-traditional mediums, as well as adapting unusual landscape and interior sites.

Utilizing an abstract, formal language, the artists in Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers helped define the structural conventions of Land Art and Post-Minimalism, such as architectural scale, the use of mathematical systems, and an awareness of the human body in relation to monumental works of art. The exhibition includes sculpture, models, photographs, drawings video, and other forms of documentation, some of which has not been shown since its original exhibition. Many of the works in this exhibition contain oblique references to the body, subjectivity, and self-portraiture.

While some artists in Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers identified their work as Feminist, many of them, including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara, and Nancy Holt explicitly rejected such categorization. This is not to say that these artists were not Feminists, only that their work was not based in a Feminist ideology and did not draw upon imagery and subject matter common to Feminist art of the time. They produced work of equal scale, ambition, and critical intentionality as their male peers.