Allison Katz, ‘Muse with a Short Fuse’, 2018, installation view, Antenna Space, Shanghai. Courtesy: Antenna Space, Shanghai
Allison Katz, ‘Muse with a Short Fuse’
Antenna Space
6 November, 2018 – 9 January, 2019
It’s hard to recall a recent exhibition title that’s catchier than Allison Katz’s, ‘Muse with a Short Fuse’, but its playful mix of camp combined with an engagement with the language and history of painting is apt to the works on view. By augmenting the conventional method of display, moving the paintings from a sequential hang on the surrounding walls to stand alone supports in the middle of the gallery, the artist shifts perspectives and subtly destabilize the seer/seen dichotomy. It’s a theme taken up within the canvases themselves, where the point of view is pushed, prodded, blocked and doubled. In pb (2018) the painting within the painting refers to a motif in an adjacent painting within the space, and in Café Man Ray at the Copley Gallery, LA 1949 (2018) we are looking through the interior of a mouth back into an exhibition space, that simultaneously references the gallery in the title and the one the viewer inhabits. By chipping away at stable reference points, gender associations, and by grounding these canvases in a banality that is simultaneously dumb, smart and mildly fantastical, Katz disperses the notion of the muse and updates its relevance for the digital age.
Read full article at Frieze.com