It May Be You Fear More to Deliver Judgment Upon Me Than I Fear Judgment is, in the words of the artist team of Lovett/Codagnone, a ‘performative sculpture’. It consists of a pair of glass objects cast in a material diametrically opposed to their original function; one of iron (torture, the heretic’s fork), the other rubber (pleasure, an S&M ball gag). These objects are presented as dual aspects of a relationship and the tenuous nature of the struggle for power in many of its various incarnations. Far too fragile to perform with, It May Be Your Fear… still conveys the qualities of danger, sexual tension and duality which exist in much of the team’s other work. The title of the piece is an historical quote, one given by the philosopher Giordano Bruno to the Grand Theologist of the Inquisition when the philosopher’s sentence of death was pronounced on the grounds of heresy. Bruno was burned at the stake on February 17th, 1600 in Rome, Italy, declared a heretic and all 30 of his books destroyed. Lovett/Codagnone's work is an ongoing exploration of relations of power as manifested in explicit cultural signifiers, including its clandestine or unconscious practices. Since 1996, Lovett/Codagnone have been rigorously engaged with performance and video installations. Previous photo-based collaborations have referenced S&M through the displacement of gay sub-cultural signifiers into suburban environments and public spaces. The content, however, is not limited to this ironic juxtaposition. As culture at large has inured itself (through fashion and other mainstream depictions of S&M and drag performance) against the destabilizing power of these practices, the artists have focused and commented on the trend, along with its underlying dynamics of interaction that sexual role-play can literalize. In many of their works the audience is confronted with a theatrical fall-out: one which reflects on the identities of scripted and patterned communications/interactions of family dysfunction. The complexity of human dynamics is dramatized, often through the distillation of a pose that demands intensity and endurance. The strenuous performances often convey the uncomfortable and complicated shifting dynamics inherent in human relationships. Lovett/Codagnone live and work in New York. A monograph on the artist’s work from 1995-2005 has been published by Charta and distributed by DAP.