new balance, 2016, 144x46x39 inches, Replicated police barricade, Paint

Originally a military device, the barricade operates as a physical structure designed to control, obstruct, and regulate movement. In new balance, I reconfigure the rigid form of a police barricade—a ubiquitous fixture of the New York City landscape—into a seesaw, an elementary structure of unstable equilibrium. By shifting an instrument of state authority into a playground apparatus defined by reciprocal weight and imbalance, the work recontextualizes the logic of control embedded within civic space. It examines the volatile relationship between power and subordination, and between the state and the citizen. Within this precarious balance, the sculpture becomes a site where the ideals of democracy are tested against the inherent instability of the structures that claim to sustain them.