Oink! Moo! Cluck! On a recent Sunday-afternoon stroll around the silent corporate precincts of the City of London, this was how a closed café advertised its meat and poultry dishes. Useful literalism, I suppose, targeted at a certain man-child clientele. But also a textual take on the familiar visual motif of a creature that peddles and consumes its own flesh: pig in a butcher’s apron, eager salmon with line and rod. There is a version of this reflexive oddity in the London-based Canadian artist Allison Katz’s current exhibition at Camden Art Centre—24 paintings and six digital-print posters. The Cockfather (2021) shows an elaborately feathered pottery egg container: a proud (or is it rueful?) cockerel that cranes its neck round at three eggs and three empty egg-holes in its flattened white back. Poor spatchcocked ceramic monster, immured (so it seems) in a sparkly black cavern.
Puffed up or pathetic, inherently comical in its masculine grandeur, the cock recurs in Katz’s paintings—it is practically a logo or trademark. At Camden, The Cockfather was tucked around a corner, while the first, large room in the show was dominated by The Other Side (2021): a rice-scattered black canvas in which a cartoonish yellow-and-blue bird repeats five times with more vivid insistence, as if speeding into view from left to right. The reference (title and image) is of course to a venerable, tiresome joke and its many variations: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Frequently with Katz, everything starts with a scrap of language such as this—or something more high-toned. She is an artist for whom annotation, allusions, puns and other wordplay are essential, but somehow this does not quite distract from the strictly visual fascinations of her work.
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