Clamshell is an installation of small sculptures that uses the existing (and up until now, vacant) display case of a working neighborhood salon.  This storefront area, comprised of small compartments, meant for displaying beauty products, is filled instead with fragmentary, impulsive, organic works of porcelain, pantyhose, bone, textile concrete, wax, and foam. These materials are mixed with “feminine” or household items such as soap, teabags, beauty supplies, and skeins of sequins that together create a tiny sculpture universe. Gross and glamorous at once, the organic and inorganic worlds of female corporeality here function as aspirational construct and brutal reality. Some are solid entities, while others teeter atop one another.  Others take on the fragility of our urban space and the materials of industrial construction: a promise of durability built to fall apart. The works in Clamshell are small corporalities, parts of bodies –at once fragmentary and whole. They stand in tension with their containers and with each other, as though they might scurry away or try somehow to convene.  The materials decide, they find their own way.