Three (Cross With Balloons)

Executed the year before her debut inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 2008, Agathe Snow's Three (Cross With Balloons) is a totem of artistic creation fashioned out of detritus from everyday life. Snow's practice is informed by the world around her. Engaging with notions of chance in art-making, the artists works often incorporate found objects from the streets of downtown New York. Here Snow presents an effigy-like figure bound in cling film on a crucifixion emerging from a mountain of mud. The artist adorns her figure with deflated balloons and a pair of tied Converse All-Stars, making the scene feel as though this is the aftermath of a raucous party gone awry. Snow tempers her apocalyptic visions of rebellion and social breakdown with an unwavering belief in the power of creativity and communal experience and expression. 'I want to speak to all without ever having to say a word,' Snow explains, 'each of the components of any of my sculpture are words to me, they are my vocabulary. These found materials are as banal as they are testimonies of the place and time they were found at. I organize them in such a way to support my narrative' (A. Snow, quoted in N. Nevitt, Trash Talking, Nylon, August 2008, unpaged).

Through the materiality and assemblage of these objects, Snow engages with her persistent belief in the value of creativity in the communication of narrative. The making of Snows sculptures is an intensely physical process. Three (Cross With Balloons) is part of a larger series which the artist created in the gallery where it was originally exhibited, inhabiting the space for the duration of the show. With her early practice celebrated for her performance work, Snow has maintained this dimension in her sculptural practice, expressed in pieces such as Three (Cross With Balloons) which expose her modes of assemblage, spontaneous decision making, and playful innovation.