Dorit Cypis redeems plywood and wool through the act of making, turning common utility on its head with an inspired determination to free associate rather than follow the directions. Usually the invisible infrastructure of buildings, plywood is transformed by Cypis into the most visible, valuable, and rare of wood uses: art frames for her tiny video monitors. Instead of processing the lambs' fleece into wool or clothing, Cypis uses it much as a painter or sculptor would, outlining the plywood grain with an overcoating of fleece, spreading and pulling it into new shapes in the wall abstraction, and finally creating a single cubic rectangle of wool in the center of the room.

Once Cypis recasts the materials, they take on new symbolic life, growing into meanings that extend beyond a simple statement of use and reuse. Far from losing its association as building material, the plywood frames echo walls and begin to look like monolithic columns and then rows of mythic trees. Liberated from its woven invisibility, the fleece once again becomes the fur of sheep, an animal whose history includes thousands of years of religious sacrifice in which it was the preferred victim. Almost without warning, the past has interpenetrated the present, the plywood frames coexisting as structural outline and support, the fleece abstraction as vision of the unknowable, the wool rectangle as sacrificial altar. Museum room become temple become ritual space, and all for a glimpse of eight miniature videos become transcendent truth, become guidebook to redemption.