Dummy Tree

Dummy Tree begins with the body parts of earlier works — the padded white limbs and red-striped athletic socks of Dummy and Sucka — and lets them grow. Suspended from the ceiling by rope and pulleys, a single trunk of stuffed white fabric branches upward and outward, each fork terminating in a red sock: toes curled, ankles striped, limbs reaching like a winter tree stripped of its leaves. What was once a surrogate body has gone feral. The form holds both the botanical and the anatomical without committing to either — it could be a coral polyp, a nervous system, a leafless oak. Rooted to the floor in a single red foot, it stretches toward ten directions at once, as if the sculpture discovered it could proliferate, and did.