Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Pregnant Woman), 2002/2004. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman’s Pregnant Woman is a standout portrait from the art chameleon whose personalities make up a wily examination of culture and gender. The subject, with her manicured nails, jewelry, coiffed hair and aggressive leopard-print top, presents a figure whose self-conscious appearance is tempered by the sense of confidence provided by her preening, a distortion of beauty and circumstance, of competing notions of youth and aging.
________
The Convivial Guest-Host
The party starts at 8 and she has a hard out at 9:30, which is why she’s the first one to show up … at 5. It’s not too bad at the beginning: she helps set tables, arranges a few plants that don’t need so much direct sunlight. She wants to workshop some name ideas, too. She thinks it’s strange that it’s almost always boys who get the Junior treatment. Why not Cindy, Jr? She doesn’t really want that, she assures. She is fixated on the letter J, though. If it’s a girl, Jeather – if it’s a boy, Jyler. Get ready for four and a half hours punctuated by Cindy appearing out of nowhere with a mocktail and a new name idea for anyone who’ll listen. Jabitha and Jichelle are in her top ten. No one knows if she’s being serious.
Marcel Dzama, Untitled, 2000. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Marcel Dzama
Canadian-born, New York-based contemporary artist Marcel Dzama regularly blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, making use of animal imagery and dreamscapes to depict characters in surreal situations. Untitled taps into the universal dream of being chased and adds a cartoonish element of bats, like a smash cut of Hitchcock’s The Birds and childhood horror stories about vampires.
________
The Last-Minute Requester
“Are pets allowed?” usually means dogs, right? That’s fine, the building allows them. Marcel seems intrepid enough to have a leash-trained cat. A lizard that lives in his coat pocket, even. Now that it’s on the mind, though, he did mention something about doing a series of bat prints, but there’s no way it would be a bat. Who would ever bring a bat to a party? Where does one even get a bat? Upon his arrival, it’s worse, much worse. Bats. Plural. Don’t worry, he says, he brought enough fruit and they’ll be out of the way. He goes on: adjusted for size, they’re the longest-lived mammals with one recorded at 41 years in the wild. It’s a conversation starter! Cindy wants to name them!
Kehinde Wiley, Kid Ike, 2006. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Kehinde Wiley
Known for his imaginative renderings of Black people in Old Master-style scenes and his iconic presidential portrait of Barack Obama, Kehinde Wiley combines a naturalistic approach with elevated forms of staging. Kid Ike, from 2006, is an early example of Wiley’s commanding ability to merge background with subject. The winding, ivy-like pattern often seen in heraldry and tapestry, frames a young man with a degree of regal confidence.
___________
The Mixmaster
He knows no one asked, but he made a playlist anyway. Where's the Bluetooth speaker? No worries if it’s dead; he’s got a backpack full of aux cables and a spare JBL. He looks around to feel the room and scrolls through his tracks, removing some songs, adding others, pointing at Marcel and saying “Misfits, definitely a Misfits song.” It’s loud at first, and there’s an odd amount of Steely Dan, but Kehinde ends up being the glue that holds the entire party together. During a lull in conversation, when the crowd is just loose enough, he plays his ace: Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Kylie Minogue. It kills. Even the bats are into it. It’s a perfect pop song, everyone agrees.
Julian Opie, Summer Rain 2, 2020. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Julian Opie
Julian Opie’s graphic style has become a ubiquitous visual shorthand in the era of vector graphics and minimalist corporate art, but the British artist’s distinct lines and character-driven offer a human interest in the body, its environment, and the trappings of modern life. The four figures in Summer Rain 2 depict a cast from any city street, walking inattentively to purposeful strides, mindlessly phone scrolling to task-driven, with their colorful stories implied by black and white simplicity.
______
The Plus One or Four
The friend-of-a-friend chain usually ends at two, three if it’s pre-arranged, but Julian’s in town and that means a crew. Their mass entrance starts the play clock for twenty to thirty minutes, tops, then they’re gone, off to something a little more downtown, even if Julian plans to stick around for coffee. Kehinde thinks it’d be funny to play a few Blur songs and get a rise out of them, but they’re too buried in their phones to notice. The only thing more imposing than showing up as a group is leaving as one – each making their way to the coat rack, caught between wanting to be seen and making a quick dash out the door. The heart says go, but the socials say make a show of leaving. The other guests look on as the Irish Goodbye quickly turns into a Brexit.
William Kentridge, Wrapped Man, from Zeno at 4am (K. pp. 118-119), 2001. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
William Kentridge
From a series of nine etchings inspired by Italian novelist Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel Confessions of Zeno, a modernist masterpiece about a paranoid, self-absorbed narrator who relays his personal manias to a psychotherapist. Kentridge channels his subject’s narcissism for Wrapped Man (from Zeno at 4am), showcasing the wrapped man as a bundle of nerves whose pensive face is constantly ready to divulge, to make up stories and draw more attention to himself.
_____
The Unreliable Narrator
La coscienza di Zeno – he says it again slowly – Laa cozy-enza dee Zehno. Blank stares. They’ll have to read it, he insists. It helped him quit smoking. He just got back from Italy, where he secured a translation contract for a book he hasn’t published in English and won’t stand for that pondwater coffee that’s going around, either. Or was he? Cindy swears he was at her gender reveal party last Sunday – who else dresses like him? Come to think of it, she says, it had to be him who made off with the six-foot sandwich she ordered. “Gossip!” he blurts, “All Americans do is gossip!” Didn’t he tell Julian he was just in Paris?
Discover More from Editions & Works on Paper >
Recommended Reading
Color Theories: Five Questions for Kassia St Clair >