Fracture 1 1982

“One of the things that people find confusing about her [Graves], and maybe a reason she’s fallen under the radar,” Hunter suggests, “is that she worked in so many media. People got confused, asking, ‘Is this all by the same person?’” Take those early camels, for instance. Sculptures made to look like taxidermy—Graves’s father worked at the Berkshire Museum, which houses natural science adjacent to fine art—they are an intellectual experiment that Nochlin compares to Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain. (One might wager that Hiroshi Sugimoto took a good look at them before shooting his “Dioramas” series.) Then there are the Graves paintings which take topographical maps (satellite images of the ocean floor and surface of the moon, for instance) and images from nature books (a halibut blending into the sand) as inspiration and wind up as brilliantly hued, layered, abstract musings. Looking at them is like seeing shapes in the clouds. And they couldn’t be more different than the hyperrealist camels.