Exhibitions

Julia Wachtel: Thirsty for Myself

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

(re)FOCUS: Mary Carlson, Karen Kilimnik, June Leaf, Ellen Lesperance, Helen O’Leary, Lilliana Porter, and Ana Tiscornia

A multi-generational group exhibit at the Art Alliance, Re Focus centers on presenting the personal historic mythologies of seven artists who probe the human condition through singular images and hand-made process. Mary Carlson’s miniature ceramic figures are often derived from Renaissance and medieval painting sources. The small scale of her sculptures and sensitive glazes gives them an intimacy that belies their power. Karen Kiliminik’s witty, wan and whimsical brushed paintings are characterized by a thrift shop Rococo sensibility, blending Old Masters with pastiches of photographs and magazine cuttings. The combination creates a contemporary fantasy world of glimmering delight. For over seven decades, June Leaf has explored a visionary and carnivalesque realm of human figures in photographs, narrative drawings, and paintings and hand-made, kinetic sculpture, all depicted in a state of active metamorphic flux. Often working simultaneously on paper, canvas, and metal, Leaf has invented an extensive personal canon of symbols and archetypes. Ellen Lesperance often references the labor traditions and heritage of women working in fiber in both actual hand-knitted works and schematic paintings related to Bauhaus fabrics, Pattern and Decoration painting and the body. Her clay Tanagra figures pay homage to Amazons, and contemporary feminist activists such as Yevgenia Isayeva, Pussy Riot and Pipilotti Rist. Helen O’Leary’s mysterious ramshackle assemblages are cobbled together amalgams of support and subsistence. Her reconfigured armatures created from found wood, are stuccoed over with applications of hand-made paints, revealing their histories and transcendental qualities like minimalist arte povera icons. Liliana Porter often uses toys or decorative figurines in installations and photographs whose interactions insinuate dark foibles of power. In these documents, she elegantly balances chaos with the need for order. Ani Tiscornia’s recent constructions refer to deconstructed architecture and ruins, implicating destruction by political upheavals. Installed upon the wall, they are stark and timely evocations of this pandemonium and repair, disaster and despair. Taken together, the works of these seven artists provide a compelling visual chronicle of the enormous strengths and subtle sensitivities of women working today.

Curator: Sid Sachs