String Theory: Julia Couzens and Julia Haft-Candell

Huntington Beach Art Center, Huntington Beach CA

July 9 – August 20, 2011

“It is in their capacity to call to mind … networks and feats of infrastructure, as well as to evoke a sense of scavenged subsistence and bodily vulnerability that the works of Couzens and Haft-Candell achieve their poignance. One becomes aware that these works – which pull off what they do in large part by simply holding together once assembled, by standing up and continuing to defy gravity, by maintaining necessary balance and tension, by staying connected, by not falling apart – share the same base aspirations as skyscrapers and space stations. At base, they are aspirational works, and are born of an aspirational mindset. But they also suggest a different kind of aspiration, and perhaps one that is less about engineering triumph than about survival, existence, and living – the aspiration to get out of bed, to live another day, to keep a body together even as it ages and breaks, to prop it up when needed, to stand.”

-Christopher Miles