January 1978. Steel, chalk line. Dimensions: 87 × 32 × 76 in (221 × 81 × 193 cm).
Collection: Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO. Gift of the Vera List Foundation.
Gallery Ladder is part of my Gallery Drawing Series, which marked a shift from the concentrated physical forces of my earlier tensegrity, or Brute Series, toward a more conceptual and linear exploration of space. Steel elements combine with a carpenter’s red chalk line snapped directly onto the gallery wall and floor, together suggesting the form of a ladder. The work blurs distinctions between drawing, sculpture, and architecture, while the ephemeral chalk line makes the gallery itself part of the work.
The title also carries a more personal, somewhat tongue-in-cheek meaning. At twenty-six, I was a young artist trying to establish myself in the art world, and the idea of “climbing the gallery ladder” seemed both appropriate and slightly absurd. Here the ladder is suggested rather than functional—there is no practical way to climb it—and the fleeting chalk line underscores the uncertain and elusive nature of that path.
A related series of charcoal drawings on standard 8½ × 11-inch graph paper explores the same idea conceptually, using the gridded gallery “cube” as a framework through which linear and planar elements move inside, outside, and beyond the gallery space.
January 1978. Steel, chalk line. Dimensions: 87 × 32 × 76 in (221 × 81 × 193 cm).
Collection: Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO. Gift of the Vera List Foundation.
Gallery Ladder is part of my Gallery Drawing Series, which marked a shift from the concentrated physical forces of my earlier tensegrity, or Brute Series, toward a more conceptual and linear exploration of space. Steel elements combine with a carpenter’s red chalk line snapped directly onto the gallery wall and floor, together suggesting the form of a ladder. The work blurs distinctions between drawing, sculpture, and architecture, while the ephemeral chalk line makes the gallery itself part of the work.
The title also carries a more personal, somewhat tongue-in-cheek meaning. At twenty-six, I was a young artist trying to establish myself in the art world, and the idea of “climbing the gallery ladder” seemed both appropriate and slightly absurd. Here the ladder is suggested rather than functional—there is no practical way to climb it—and the fleeting chalk line underscores the uncertain and elusive nature of that path.
A related series of charcoal drawings on standard 8½ × 11-inch graph paper explores the same idea conceptually, using the gridded gallery “cube” as a framework through which linear and planar elements move inside, outside, and beyond the gallery space.
