Andrea Zittel has been
working at the intersection of design and art since the early 35 1990s. Her art initially took the form of appealing, utilitarian fashion and furniture, a project that started as a strategy of personal self-sufficiency and developed into a coherent body of material that she presents under the "brand name" A-Z (A-Z Uniforms, for example). In the late 1990s, Zittel moved from New York to a remote high desert site in California in order to pursue more focused explorations of ideas and materials. She describes her home there, A-Z West, as "an institute of investigative living" and notes that the "A-Z enterprise encompasses all aspects of day-to-day living. Home furniture, clothing, food all become the sites of investigation in an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs."

This multipart installation samples Zittel's larger, ongoing project, A-Z Advanced Technologies. In these simultaneously philosophical and practical investigations, Zittel has devised ways to simplify daily living, which for her includes her work as an artist. She has developed processes to make art from simple methods, using easily available renewable or waste materials such as wood, cotton, wool, and even junk mail. In the installation presented in Beyond Green, the artist used commercially produced carpet and paint as an abstract backdrop for several discrete elements: a billboard prototype; one of her trademark plywood shelves adorned with hand-felted bowls and found objects; and an abstract shape that she crocheted by hand.

The latter plays with art history to subtly underscore Zittel's utopian aspirations for a new mode of daily living. Through its dramatic shape and its title-Forward Motion- this irregular piece of handicraft recalls the work of revolutionary Russian painters and designers who tried to enact radical new ways of living and working almost a century ago. In such works, Zittel embraces the speculative uses of art: in a recent interview she noted, "I am not a designer- designers have a social responsibility to provide solutions. Art is more about asking questions."