Virginia Overton

"Equilibrium and balance are forces I use a lot in my work", Virginia Overton has previously observed. Often this is quite literally the case, since the artist's sculptural assemblages frequently entail improbable acts of suspension. In one instance, pedestals are squeezed together to create a compressed bridge hovering between gallery walls. Elsewhere, a folded sheet of reflective metal is wedged between tree limbs, seemingly ready to spring free if not tied down. Or an upside-down chair, feet firmly planted on the ceiling, is propped up by a tall length of wood kept in place only by a ratchet strap fastened high above viewers' heads. In light of Overton's choice of wording, such sculptures could summon the example of Fischli and Weiss's 1984-87 "Equilibres" series, while making a reflexive turn. They consist of ordinary objects repurposed with a nearly anthropomorphic sense of play, and yet, unlike that earlier photographic series, they put the basic-even the refreshingly flat-footed-mechanics of their arrangements readily on display.

The conditions for the making of Overton's sculptures are much more ambiguous than the finished works suggest, primarily because the work's execution typically takes place over extended periods of time. Overton will often spend weeks at an exhibition's location, scouting the gallery's back rooms and surroundings for objects to integrate into her sculptures. This procedure reveals not only the materials but also the atmosphere of a place-or better, a history tangibly embedded within those materials. As Overton explains, she allows "the work to act as a marker of its own history... [making apparent] the ways in which the materials have been used." And herein resides the most complex aspect of the artist's practice. On the one hand, she gestures toward the standard, nominal character of sculpture after the readymade: "Really", she says matter-of-factly, "art is just a rearrangement of matter and a declaration that it is 'art'". On the other hand, her work's "historical" character tends to erode any fast sense of the distinction (or clear value for the declaration). In fact, while certain sculptures by Overton are immediately legible within the prisms of Minimalism or process-based work, others-including her near-ubiquitous parked trucks on- and off-site during her shows-almost disappear within the living topography of their context, rendered distinct less by virtue of their ostensible recasting as art than for simply not being used for the duration of a given exhibition.

In this respect, it is tempting to expand Overton's assertion about equilibrium and balance, allowing a metaphorical force to attend any material instantiation. Indeed, perhaps a more apt comparison of her work to anything by Fischli and Weiss would involve The Way Things Go (1987). In this film objects are activated, shown unfolding inside a specific mechanism, perpetually falling away from their articulated status - balanced between uses, but only for a time.

Tim Griffin