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Model Behavior is an exhibition of sculpture and photographs. The ideas hinge on the word model. The first sense of this word is an ideal, an aspiration or an inspiration. At the same time to model something is to map it, make a simulation of it or to emulate it. To model something is to give it form, to reify it. Models are the first steps in the evolution of a product, they carry the original intent of a thing and lay out the constituent parts.
Adding the word behavior emphasizes the ideal quality of the endeavor and creates an equivalency that is reiterated in the sculptures. The equivalency refers to the distance between a model (a concept) and a behavior (an action). For Rees this distance is a generative space where works begin to bifurcate formally and semantically. Through iteration and reiteration, these experiences take form upon the crystalline structure of hard matter. These options are contained within that material. They speak the different impulses and layers of a piece creating a valence of meanings. There is humor and conflict in this show: some of the works would never be considered an ideal of anything. They are play oriented puzzles, riddles of stability and instability. The work questions the stasis of these models and engages it through the fluidity of content as one considers works contrasted against each other. The act of making these works is like breathing or walking. They are basic, held close to automatic processes and to liminal space.
To mine this mental to physical space and to extract from it potential and even ethical implications of action is to participate in mimetic culture. Making is a process that can be transferred through obects to others. It can open up possibilities potentials and meanings and it can play in the unwinding of human experience. For Rees, this takes place through the consonance and dissonance of the works in Model Behavior.
photo documents
catalogue for the exhibition
Press Release
interview with Thyrza Goodeve