Siah Armajani often conflates architecture, sculpture, furniture, and engineering. Ranging from gallery-based sculpture to highway-spanning bridges, building fragments, outdoor gathering places, or an employee lounge, Armajani’s work plays with the function of the everyday built and domestic environment. Quintessentially “Post-modern” in the sense that he dismantles and recombines familiar elements into new forms and narratives, Armajani uses building elements—mantles, seating, molding, shelving, and many other details—as a kind of grammar to organize his forms.

Armajani has often cited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum: “If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the fine arts from the useful arts.” With these ideas in mind, he has created a series of objects and structures that seem to be utilitarian and yet conspicuously have no function beyond their extraordinary presence.

In 1988, Lina Bertucci began a series of photographic portraits of emerging artists, many of whom have gone on to high-profile careers. These portraits tap into society’s desire for and consumption of iconic images of artists and, correspondingly, into the artists’ desire to define themselves in the eyes and minds of viewers. Unlike paparazzi photographs of celebrities, however, Bertucci’s elegant and enigmatic images suggest an intimate familiarity with each artist and his or her work.

For Haim Steinbach, 1988, Bertucci photographed the artist Haim Steinbach sitting a couch wearing a mask of the character Yoda from Star Wars, with twin girls standing on his left. In his work, Steinbach has traditionally explored the role of commercial objects in our everyday lives and their implications in defining who we are. The inclusion of both the mask and the twins in this photograph seems to refer to Steinbach’s sculptural method, in which he juxtaposes seemingly arbitrary elements to suggest a narrative that is open to the associations of each individual viewer. Bertucci’s arrangement of her subjects on a slim, Modernist couch also echoes Steinbach’s installations, in which objects are displayed on simple, angled shelves.