LINCOLN, MASS.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is presenting PLATFORM 15: Oscar Tuazon, Partners, a new large-scale outdoor sculpture on view until September 1, 2015. Partners at deCordova is the first of the artist Oscar Tuazon’s work in New England.

DeCordova’s long-standing PLATFORM series sees its fifteenth iteration with Los Angeles-based Tuazon’s innovative project in the Sculpture Park. PLATFORM is a series of exhibitions by early- and mid-career artists from both the New England and national arts communities. Following the goal of the program to engage with deCordova’s unique landscape, Tuazon took as his inspiration one of the Sculpture Park’s most defining features: its beautiful and varied tree species. Partners unites one of deCordova’s sugar maple trees with a tall, thin minimal concrete structure. The two pillars–one natural and the other artificial–rise from the Sculpture Park lawn, subtly joining together nearly two stories above the ground.

Though both elements of the sculpture have the capacity to be self-supporting, their union is delicately balanced so that each becomes dependent upon the other. Tuazon’s work thrives at this suggested impasse: the juncture when work of art approaches (though does not fully achieve) functionality, and when a (seemingly) utilitarian form ceases to be useful. The tension of this meeting of timber and reinforced concrete is further accentuated by the juxtaposition of nature and culture within deCordova’s bucolic landscape, as the concrete form references a greater urban landscape beyond the Sculpture Park.

Born in Seattle, WA in 1975, Oscar Tuazon is a sculptor living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Tuazon studied at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, Studio Program, New York, NY; and at Cooper Union School of Architecture, Architecture/Urban Studies Program, New York, NY. In 2007, he cofounded the collective-run artists’ gallery, bookshop, and publishing house castillo/corrales in Paris. His work has been shown extensively throughout the world, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and in the 2012 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. He was also a participant in the 2011 Venice Biennale. He has had solo exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Bridge Park, NY. Among other accolades, the artist was recently awarded a prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 2013.

With Partners, Tuazon merges the natural and the industrial to engage with ideas of architectural stability and conceptual failure, prompting questions about form and function as they relate to the creation of art.