Becky Kolsrud
Blue/Red Gate
20" x 15.5", archival pigment print
Signed edition of 50
$200
Inspired by the specific type of curated glamour found in American print catalogs and strip mall portrait studios, Becky Kolsrud mines found photographs for the anonymous subjects featured in her paintings. The women are typically either engulfed in sublimely expansive landscapes or partially camouflaged by a distinct diamond pattern resembling a fence, which both traps and protects its characters in their 2D world. These flexibly ambiguous narratives heighten Kolsrud's figures existence as Women in the archetypal sense; simultaneously at one with and separate from nature; encumbered yet liberated; the victims and controllers of the gaze. By employing barriers as a motif, Kolsrud explores the externally imposed structures that prevent women from being the recipients of an unobstructed gaze.
From a purely formal perspective, Kolsrud successfully navigates the overlap between abstraction and representation. In Blue/Red Gate, pairs of eyes peer, glare, and sneer from beyond their electric hued barricade while faces are obscured, the result a piling of imagined women grounded in reality.
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