The 2008 exhibition, Beyond Babylon at the Museum of Metropolitan Art, explored gifting as a means for forging international relations, artistic exchange, and scholarship during the period (second millenium BC). Throughout, these utilitarian objects endured and transformed the arts and culture of the region, while maintaining a meditative humility in their material manifestations.

Rusted bike chain tangling gold plate necklace chain, broken aviator shades, glittered leather strap, fly tape dotted with dead flies ––these connectors, objects which facilitate and mediate our experience with both one another and our surroundings fall into disrepair, are discarded, updated, or replaced.

Here, the horse bit becomes a bracelet, a handcuff shared through a complicit series of gestures. Basic tools float between the black male hand and the white female hand. The violence within the animated gestures is implied rather than implicit. The tempo and familiarity of the hands belies a tender association. Subjectivity within the static object is amplified by the process of stop motion animation as lighter, knife, brush, bit, coin are photographed over and over again, slightly shifted within the composition for each frame.