My MFA thesis exhibition, Friends & Family, presents an ongoing exploration of the capacity of everyday spaces and objects to dictate the choreography of social interaction. Informed by my childhood experiences of Soviet architecture in Ukraine, the form and materiality of the works in the exhibition reference railings, fences and public exercise equipment: utilitarian structures that presuppose a specific user and set of behaviors. These original forms stand as tangible manifestations of social conventions and modes of behavior. A handrail, for example, both facilitates and obstructs motion, channeling the flow of pedestrians into the normalizing logic of paths and stairways.

In the exhibition, the original functions of these utilitarian structures are subverted through shifts in scale, placement and context. Forms are deconstructed, recreated and positioned in ways that necessitate new visual and physical modes of navigating the exhibition space. Site lines are framed and offset with forms that bring into focus relationships between the properties of the space, its occupants and the works themselves. Re-created to new parameters, the sculptural objects acquire new associations and reveal formal properties obscured in the original by its familiarity and use, rendering them abstractions of their former selves.