Steven Wolf Fine Arts

Whitney Lynn continues exploring psychological spaces of containment, desire and control at Steven Wolf Fine Arts with a group of new sculptures that take their inspiration from traps.

Traps are made to deceive, ensnare, capture or kill and Lynn makes use of their functionality as the starting point for works whose intended prey shifts depending on how they are considered.

The sculptures are loosely based on well-known works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre and other pioneers of the 1960s. They are at once a withering critique of the specific object—sculpture unrelated to the outside world, which emerged from that tumultuous era—and discursive metaphors for the way viewers relate to artworks in a gallery situation.

"The sculptures speak directly to issues of function, form and context, " says Lynn. When those are changed and we find ourselves no longer in a forest but in a gallery, Lynn says, "new questions can arise regarding what is the bait and what is the prey."