Julia Wachtel originally emerged as a member of New York’s Pictures Generation, who focused on appropriated contemporary media in late 1970’s. She pioneered in critiquing and reconstructing the visual language of mass culture with great irony and wit while engaging in deep critical discourse about popular culture and politics, the construction of identity and emotion, and dominant narratives about consumption. Through silkscreen printing and oil paint, Wachtel’s images were interrupted by visual breaks that resemble pages passages as recorded against a scanner bed, stripes caused from printer heads being out of alignment, or glitches running across a corrupted digital file. Often juxtaposing high and low, right and left, clean and dirty, Wachtel displaces her imagery and allows their resulting ambiguity to facilitate her viewers in unlearning received conceptions of power and intent. These simple devices like flipping, generate multiple readings in people’s minds, suggesting that these pictures work in subversive ways.

Curator: Sid Sachs