Annie Ratti

Annie Ratti creates environments that combine form and function, ethics and aesthetics, inviting the viewer into a space of politics and pleasure. She draws on the vernacular of domestic furniture to build sculptures for sitting or swinging in, reading in or sleeping on, and originally proposed to put a bridge into New York's White Box in Chelsea for the installation documented here. Instead she has transformed that gallery space, through a series of multimedia effects, into a pool--a space in which to reflect on the social complexity of urban life on the waterfront. Beyond the interactions of such universally known forms--the chair, the bed, the bridge--Ratti looks to specifics, geographical, historical and social, and transforms her private experience of the world into a public and participatory event. Ratti lives between her native Italy and France, Britain and America, and has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout Europe and America.