The present works on paper by Monica Bonvicini served as the preparatory sketches for the artist's 1997 video installation Hausfrau Swinging, in which a nude woman wears a prosthetic head in the shape of a house, and bangs it violently against two walls that form a kind of alcove corner, an open yet claustrophobic space that brings to mind and reveals the influence of Bruce Nauman. Bonvicini borrows the imagery of a nude woman with a house for a head from Louise Bourgeois's 1947 drawing, Femme/Maison, another work that shows how architecture can be used to predicate restrictive parameters on gender and identity.

In these works, Bonvicini shows that the structure of the family home is not a neutral or ungendered space. And within this structure, a woman - or, a hausfrau - is identified and meant to identify herself through the prescribed roles of “mother” or “housewife.” However, the violence with which Bonvicini’s hausfrau attempts to break through her house helmet - one that notably obscures her vision but allows her to be seen­ - is telling of not just the inadequacy of these systems of identification, but also her incapacity, or refusal, to reconcile and assimilate who she is as a subjective individual to who is supposed to be in a given architectural context.

Bonvicini makes further reference to Marcel Duchamp's infamous Etants Donnés, which similarly uses architecture to touch upon issues of voyeurism, violence, fantasy and objectification. 

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"Jay DeFeo used the idea of man's battles against nature in the way that she had initially with the notion of mountain climbing as a metaphor for her struggles with cancer. Many of the works from this period have references to forces of nature, such as whitewater and mountain climbing. On the eve of her surgery in 1988, she watched a televised climb of Mount Everest.  She would use the idea of mountain climbing again as a metaphor for her struggle. This incredibly dynamic composition of White Water [image at right] can be seen in those terms as well."

[Above text by Dana Miller, from a transcript of a tour conducted during Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2013]

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During the 1970s, Nancy Graves made a substantial body of paintings, drawings, prints and a film that delved into the systems that underlie the production and legibility of maps. While her earliest works were based on illustrations selected from ethnographic studies of Polynesian and Inuit navigational maps, Graves’s formal engagement with mapping took a new direction when she chose to depict detailed images of the topographies of Mars, the Moon, Mercury and Earth’s ocean floors based on data transmitted by orbiting satellites, then a pioneering technology.

The above work, First Look at the World's Weather, is based on a global photomosaic that was assembled from 450 individual pictures taken by the satellite Tirox IX on February 13, 1965. The horizontal white line marks the equator. Special photographic processing was used to increase the contrast between major land areas, outlined in white, and the surrounding oceans. The brightest features on the photographs are clouds; ice in the antarctic and snow in the north are also very bright. The clouds are associated with many different types of weather patterns. The scalloping at the bottom shows how the earth’s horizon appears in individual pictures.

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"For Kiki Kogelnik, the human body was something that could be engineered, programmed, plugged in and turned on. Parts could be swapped out and mechanical prostheses added. Her exploration of bionic pesonages surfaces in several rudimentary ink drawings, [like the work titled Untitled (Robot) (1964), shown below]. The body cavity in this work resembles a boiler room or car engine more than human anatomy.

Kogelnik's technoid appendages and bionic bodies recall the 'mechanomorphology' of Marcel Duchamp's Coffee Grinder (1914) and other components of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23), as well as Francis Picabia's mechanomorphs.

Besides the human figure, the circle was the most frequently employed motif in Kogelnik's visual vocabulary [as shown in the above work Untitled (Robots) (1967)]. She used various methods of creating level circles in her paintings and works on paper: stencils, stamps, hole punches and tracing objects. Kogelnik often used the circle motif to convey a sense of transparency, creating overlapping images or perforating her forms. The effect of this totalizing device is to remind us that the entirety of our universe is composed of the same basic elements; in essence, we are all made of stardust."

[Above text by Dana Miller, excerpted from "Leaving an Impression: The Art of Kiki Kogelnik," Kiki Kogelnik, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, 2019, pp. 10-12]

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For more than 30 years, Annette Lemieux has produced a conceptually informed body of work which challenges traditional notions of visual style. Part of a generation of artists who emerged around the time of Douglas Crimp’s hugely influential Pictures exhibition in 1977, which applied the word “pictures” to artworks to defy medium specificity, her work takes its point of departure in a radical questioning of aesthetic hierarchies. Using a variety of techniques as well as media, including painting, photography, sculpture, collage and a combination of the above, she addresses socially pertinent topics such as history, war and identity. 

The above work, titled Mon Amour, combines two disparate images: one shows the devastating aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; the other is a candid tableau of an American holiday locale. Both images were taken from Time-Life photography books and, while vastly contrasting in subject matter, they are linked visually through the shared elevated perspective and the motif of the staircase. The work shows how two very different situations - one horrific and one not - could exist at the same time. Through the title, the artist references French filmmaker Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour (screenplay by Margeurite Duras), wherein a French actress and a Japanese architect contemplate the impact of the atomic bombings across a nonlinear storyline that conflates and confuses past, present and future.

Jessica Stockholder is known for her idiosyncratic, charged constructions that simultaneously occupy the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture. Since the 1980s, she has combined readymade and manipulated objects into at once simple and complex, formal and chaotic works that challenge conventional understandings of the separation between pictorial and actual space. Through her choice of everyday materials—including rugs, grocery store shopping baskets, wires, printers, real and artificial fruit, lamps, driveway mirrors and plastic bumps used for foot massage—her assemblages are suggestive of surrealist narratives, while also emerging as abstract tableaux in which color, texture and the space in between assume autonomy.

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