artist highlights the interaction between man and nature, the active dialogue between the sculptor and his material. Graves further accentuates this balance by allowing the limestone slabs to retain some of the tool markings from the quarry. The man-made rings also call to mind ruined Kivas, ancient Native American above-and-below-ground ceremonial structures, like those found in Chaco Canyon or Pueblo Bonito. Graves incorporated the solemn mystery of these sites into the Mirror pieces. The three circles each contain smaller sections inlaid with a honeycomb of bamboo reeds. Like the inner chambers of a Kiva, they invite us to explore an interior dimension of the piece.

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The smaller bronze work This Mirror Can Crack a Stone XXII presents the circle motif recessed in the center of a multi-tiered tablet. Two winged appendages fitted on either side of the circle look as if the sculpture’s skin has been peeled back to reveal its interior. As much a portal as a mirror, the sculpture teases out the meaning of Graves’ title, which is a wry subversion of Henry David Thoreau’s description of Walden Pond, “a mirror which no stone can crack...a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush.” In Graves’ title, subject and object are transposed. The mirror as metaphor for the self acts upon the stone and alters perception through art. The mirror does not present a mere reflection of reality; it introduces another dimension of vision.

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Throughout his career, Graves was intrigued by the concept of tools. A tool’s form, however ingenious, is determined by its function, yet Graves felt there was a real mystery in tools. How did people decide that a certain form was ideally suited to perform its function? Graves deconstructed this relationship through sculptures of wheels, axes, walkways. Gauve II, one of a related group of sculptures Graves made in the late 1970s, is a reinterpretation of the bridge, but, given the work’s sharp curvature and rhythmic carving, no one could walk upon it. Slat Breakdown, a small bronze sculpture, is a walkway, whose slats are jumbled, bending at their joints and curling fancifully. What would have been stairs on an incline have been lifted up and left to dangle over a precariously smooth slope of metal. The form is separated from its utilitarian purpose and its meaning is redefined as art object—and yet the original function still hovers in the work’s form and material.

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Graves had eclectic tastes and a voracious appetite for books and music. He built up an impressive library and record collection throughout his life. Graves closely followed musicians in jazz and avant-garde music and named a number of works and series after people whose music he admired. Graves named one early series of works Dolphy after the alto saxophonist, flutist, and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy. This exhibition includes the first piece in the series, Dolphy I, a weathered limestone work composed of six units atop a stone base. Graves created the piece early in his career, in 1973, and it shows him working through the concepts of cubism and constructivism. Graves had discussed the use of constructivist methods in his own work as a way of allowing space to become an active part of the form. “This is a unifying method of working,” he wrote, “that permits each unit of my sculpture to create its own reasons for existence.” Much of Graves’ sculpture is abstract, and yet there are recognizable reference points which dot the imagination—one can perhaps see in the long arched block, lightly pressing on one of the limestone discs, a finger arrested in motion along the sonorous valves of a saxophone. The upper block also retains those characteristic grooves left from hoisting in the quarry, a visual remembrance of its origins as a monolithic block of stone. Other musically inspired pieces in this exhibition include the two November Steps sculptures, which Graves completed a month before he died. They were named after a musical composition by the Japanese avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu.

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The influence of constructivism can be seen more subtly in two of Graves’ later pieces, Gonaive (1982) and Stuttering His Own Bent (1995). Gonaive, with its seductively smooth surfaces and mesmerizing geometry, is one of many of Graves’ works that possesses a kind of easy charm. Here, the sections are contained within one piece, each one layered upon the other, creating a series of sinuous folds that call to mind the concentric circles of a seashell, or perhaps some other-worldly astronaut’s helmet. The evocatively titled Stuttering His Own Bent contains four major units, varied by texture, shape, and design. The sections are stacked vertically one upon another, giving the piece a totemic, anthropomorphic quality. The capping stone easily suggests a phallus but at second glance the sculpture also seems to be arching forward and trying to speak. Where there would be a mouth, however, there is only a wordless mask of stone.

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Some of Graves’ work mingles the ethereal and abstract with a physical, biological reality, as one can observe in the series Loud in the Blood, begun in 1984. In that one year, both his mother and father died of heart disease and Graves himself suffered a major heart attack. The tumultuous events greatly affected his imagery. Loud in the Blood IV has the cool archaeological look of a ruined aqueduct. From its title, however, one interprets the cascading water as a stream of blood flowing out of a stone cavity, which is also vaguely reminiscent of the mirror series motif. The oozing blood collects in a sluice-like trough below. A thin crossbar straddles the channel as the pool of liquid clots into a tumid bead, which threatens to break and spill over the edge. It is an exploration of mortality and the body’s fragility framed within the crumbling structure of civilizations past. The subject is sublimated, rendered even playful. Ravages of Silent Agencies, a small piece carved from African wonderstone, also shares this whimsical exploration of time and decay’s effect on living forms. On the back side, a scarab-like relief is perched upon a smooth rim of stone. A maze of small white lines radiate out of the figure and cover the piece in all directions. They look as if they’ve slowly wormed their way through the stone: centuries of imperceptible tunneling motion leaving behind a marvelous web of corrosion—the ravages of silent agencies.

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Though primarily a sculptor, Graves produced many pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, and torn- and layered-paper collages, as well as illustrations for art and music events and collaborations with poets and other writers. His drawings range from representational portraits to studies in design to images of cosmic spheres colliding and collapsing in space. They share with his sculptures a certain playfulness as well as a driven curiosity about man’s relationship to space—about our place within the cosmos.

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More than any other art form, sculpture engages with space, allowing space to become a part of the form, and making us aware of our position within it. Through his dialogue with stone, carried out with chisel, hammer, die-grinder, point, and claw, Graves was able to fathom the mystery of the universe. As he put it, “You become a link in the movement of the universe as it circles through space. You become a part of a mystery. You are within and participating in that mystery,” rather than looking on and defining it from the outside. One can find in each of Bradford Graves’ works some element of that encounter, out of which a quiet sense of mystery and tranquility is born.