Judy Pfaff harmonizes deliberate planning with improvisation as she composes her sprawling sculptures and installations. “When you’re making something, you’re always focused on finishing it,”says the artist in this film. “And then, when you step back, you start seeing all of these things that you didn’t plan.”

Through a unique fusion of sculpture, architecture, and painting, Pfaff’s dynamic environments exist in both the second and third dimensions; exuding an impossible sense of lightness and energy collaged in time and space. By means of wood, steel, wax, plaster, fluorescent lights, paint, black foil, expanding foam, and tape, Pfaff created Buckets of Rain, a large scale installation occupying two galleries. This timelapse video chronicles the work’s two week installation at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York in 2006.

When asked about the emotional elements of the piece Pfaff said the installation “was directly about a great loss or a kind of drama, and more about choices- black and white, life and death, good and bad, and the impact of that. It just embarrasses me even to think that way, that I did that. But, you know, I didn’t feel I had a choice.”