by Shamim M. Momin

The work of E.V. Day, Teresita Fernandez, and Tom Friedman might all be understood as sculpture, though they represent highly distinct approaches to the term. E.V. Day's work explores cultural fetishism and the interplay of desire, fantasy, and popular culture. Day's suspended, 'exploding' couture dresses, wetsuits, and women's lingerie investigate the construction/deconstruction of identity and the relationship between the organic and the technological through seductive material and form. Drawing from architectural theory, gender studies, and historical lanascape design, Teresita Fernandez transforms prefabricated, often explicitly artificial materials such as transparent plastic tubing, acrylic cubes, theatrical scrims, and plastic laminate into abstracted, site-specific investigations of one's emotive response to space. Tom Friedman employs painstaking, near-obsessive techniques to create conceptually pointed objects using familiar, everyday materials--including sugar cubes, bubble gum, hair, toothnicks, construction paper. Friedman's intimate objects gently, often humorously, invite the viewer to investigate the tacit systems that construct our daily lives.

Shamim M. Momin: At a time of ever-increasing fluidity between genres and their definitions, do you think or yourself specifically as a sculptor? What does that mean to you-- how do you define your practice?

E.V. Day: The terms 'sculpture' and 'installation' function as a sort of catchall category for my work; however, I am most comfortable formally describing my large pieces as three-dimensional drawings, integrated into the architectural site. For me this stems from historical mentors of the post-minimalist era--Fred Sandback, Eva Hesse, and Richard Tuttle. I think of Sculpture as a Ireestanding object that does not care about the x, y, and z coordinates beyond it. I also relate sculpture and print-making. etching a plate as a subtractive process of physically removing material and creating depth and surface which feels very much like sculpting on a micro level.

Teresita Fernandez: While most art forms are understood on some level as overt "constructions,' those that happen to be experienced in three dimensions seem to occupy a real-time, real-space 'nowness' that is most like the viewer's own presence in the space of presentation. However, any notion of 'sculpture' versus anything else seems silly. I see my own work as quite consciously fusing ideas about painting, drawing, and film with ideas about traditional sculpture. Surface and material create a diffused, flickering etfect that seems intangible and ephemeral, a difficult and fascinating thing to explore in three dimensions, in large-scale scuiptures employing very concrete, often heavy, materials.

Tom Friedman: I think of myself more as someone who makes things to be experienced and thought about. These things that I make are placed in an art context because it seems to be an environment that potentially has the ability to slow down one's experience and request thoughtfulness. I choose this very general definition because it is more open-ended.

SMM: The notion of experiencing an object in space seems to dominate the way you all consider your work, more than specific definitions of sculpture. Given the integral relationship between a three-
dimensional object and its spatial presentation, how do you think about the interaction of your work with its installation and, relatedly, with the viewer?

TFE: We lack a commonly-used word that exactly describes the relationship I imagine between the work and whoever is experiencing it: I use the word "viewer" out of convenience. "Viewer" limits experience to the eyes; "spectator"' implies a distance and a theatricality or event: "participant" implies a program. I'm really interested in a sort of partnership between this individual person and what I make, where to be engaged is to somehow merge what is tactile and what is imagined, like eyes on the skin. It then becomes impossible to dissect "viewer," from "art object" from "effect."

TR: Sculpture to me is about the specific object, and installation is about the interaction between the objects. When I conceive of a body of work there is a play back and forth between my thinking about the self-contained object, the totality of objects together, and the space that they will occupy as an installation. I envision the viewer navigating through the physical space, investigating, discovering, questioning, so the art becomes a catalyst tor the viewer to create and meander through a fluid conceptual space. I try to create a situation with my work where each piece builds upon the other to define and contradict itself.

EVD: 'Installation' is a broad category, but specific to the extent that the idea/artwork is defined by necessity through its precise relationship to the architectural site. The unique qualities of a space function like the edges of a page for a 2-D drawing.

MM: To what extent do you use your work to entice the viewer to think about the material employed - between the three of you, ranging from thongs, to plastic tubing, to accursed air? At what point in thinking about a project do the material and formal choices enter the picture?

TFE: I understand my work first conceptually and as such, abstractly. Formal and material choices become a solution for how to achieve a desired set of effects. I tend to choose materials that have a transparency or luminosity, that create an almost three-dimensional sfumato. It has less to do with the inherent qualities of a material and more with the fact that we experience and read transparent things in a certain way; the act of thinking and looking seamlessly override the physicality of a material. In this sense, I think of the viewer's engagement as one of my materials as well.

EVD: The idea of seduction forms my work both conceptually and formally. The main attraction is suspended, mostly by fishing tackle and hardware that by definition reiterates the intent of a lure-- to lure in the viewer towards an icon in the process of disintegration or transtormation.

TFR: Sometimes the material is the starting point and other times it's the idea. But ultimately my ongoing investigations into are the guiding factor.

SMM: The current plurality of contemporary art, both in medium as well as in conceptual aproach, seems to allow artists greater freedom to consciously draw on broad arrays of history in their work--not merely from art, but trom all arenas. What precedents or influences would you cite as important to your work?

TFE: I have a was been interested in the cinematic aspect of how we collectively see and think. Not necessarily the cinematic apparatus or event, but rather the internal action that takes place while experiencing film. For me film and sculpture are intricately linked by the viewer's imagined movements. And in this sense, the "viewer" is an accomplice of the work. Goddard once said that "It takes two to create an image."

TFR: Music and psychology. but I am open to the idea of influence from a multi-layered potential of experiences ranging from the instantaneous glance or blip to the investigated interest.

EVD: I would say I think about techniques of sculpting as much as I also consider those of designers and architects and motion pictures. Some influences...  TV and Italian futurism, Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, and the technical photography of Harold Edgerton and Muybridge. What sustains and inspires me is loud music and the comfort of white noise. Someday I hope it will be exercise and clean living.

SMM: Much has been written on the idea that all art is in some sense political. Beyond the notion of the inherent politics of context and display, do you consider your work political, explicitly or implicitly?

EVD: My projects develop out of information and inquiry, and then experimentation. Politics follow. I am specifically interested in accessories that are used to define sex and power. But whether I choose a thong or a stealth fighter, or turn one into the other, people shoul have an opinion. It is Important to note that I cannot transform a stealth fighter into a wearable undergarment, and that is a good thing.

TFE: The one underlying constant for me in work that I make or work that I experience is that it exists as a potential moment of engagement. Engagement is what creates dialogue, internal or external. These moments of individual subjectivity and reaction are what create a social form--something that carries over into a bigger way of thinking that has immense meaning. An external dialogue only occurs after an internal one is in Iull swing.

TER: To me art has the potential to grow out of and reveal such a complexity and richness of being. It became very clear to me after September 11 that tear can close one down. The insecurity that fear creates torces one to look for things they know are sate. This creates a static space-- the antithesis of what art is about. I want to create a space of openness, fluidity, curiosity, and play.