...The challenges and dangers of group identity formation are wryly addressed in A Story with Two Ends (2008). Here, a beaver-chewed stick is used as a rod to bear the pennants of two teams. Gnawed from both ends, it suggests a perverse kind of competition, a game where the main object is perhaps to eat, to build, or just to reach the center first. Like a group of Young Pioneers (something like ideologically-inflected Boy and Girl Scouts in the former Soviet Union), the beaver-masked competitors march in lockstep on an abstract sunburst field, heroic images of the landscape at their backs. The beaver masks serve as emblems of connection to the land, and also work to subsume personal into collective identity. When you join a "team" or take a side you sacrifice a part of your individual identity in order to take on membership (voluntarily or not) in a group identity. The propaganda-inspired triangular flag forms are no accident. If you want to indoctrinate people into following your ideological notion of nationalism, you'd better start early. In fact, the two teams, with their opposing flags waving, are like emblems of ideological positions competing for hegemony. The mixing of abstract design and photography calls to mind the constructivist propaganda placards of the Soviet Union in its infancy. But when one learns that the models for the figures depicted on the flags are friends of the artists, the work takes on a more personal dimension...

excerpt from "Itinerant Borders" by Elizabeth M. Grady, Dam Lines Catalog, 2008