CHRISTOPHER SPROAT, ARTIST’S STATEMENT FOR “TABLEAUX” CATALOG, WAVE HILL, BRONX, NY. MAY 15 ? OCT. 18, 1981

The inclusion of art into a space whether interior or exterior presents a theater for vicarious experience.

At Wave Hill the stage has been set by a generation of nobility that may no longer exist in North America.  It is in reference to this lost grandeur that the meaning of this tableau is modulated.  Seemingly masquerading as nostalgia, the intention is to locate between forms of the past and a present notion of existence.  This garden party is an illusion of comfort, wealth, order, and classical form.  In reality, the couch is only marginally comfortable, the tools are unusable, and the rules have been altered to form a configuration that is too self-involved to afford active participation.