2023: Consider the Hands

The pulse of our shared humanity. Outsized, disproportioned figures, crowding the visual plane. Vaguely ominous landscapes. Contemplation, mourning, presence and transience in the world, as it is. Playing on Picasso’s idealized and outsized women, this body of work coincides with the reappraisal of his legacy, fifty years after his death. One hundred years ago, Picasso embraced both proportion and distortion, also during a period of global political crisis. Here, singular or grouped figures are seen in stark reproduction of his compositions, or in composite images from several of his works. They are placed in landscapes from Brandenburg’s photographs and drawings. Rising waters, vessels, beached whales, in a slightly skewed landscape predominate. Consideration of the hands and their impact- another thread in this work. Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keefe’s hands, seen here picking up Greek hydria vessels made thousands of years ago by other hands, reiterates both grounding in history and the elasticity of time. Understatement, glitchy shifts of point of view and depth of field create rhythmic, sometimes shimmery moments of transparency and opacity, resonant of the process of personal and societal reappraisal underway for many of us.