Pleasure & Protest

Jackie Gendel, Yana Payusova, Lovie Olivia, Alexis Pye & Keer Tanchak

Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, October 13 - November 17, 2023

Galleries of Contemporary Art at the Ent Center for the Arts, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, January 25 - March 16, 2024

Pleasure & Protest presents figure painting as a sensory and political engagement through hybrid practices. Connecting conceptual threads in the work of these five artists center on exploring or re-situating domestic craft and decorative art practices in relation to painting the figure. They employ strategies of pattern, gesture and repetition through a range of materials and methods including watercolor, fresco-secco, wallpaper, clay and embroidery. Their works celebrate handwork and revel in the pleasures of tactile surfaces, decoration and ornamentation. Over forty years on from the groundbreaking Pattern and Decoration art movement, works by these five artists prompt fresh discussion about the renewed value of craft in contemporary art practices. Collectively their work protests against hierarchies in subject and material, and their concerns in paint reflect current feminist discourse about cultural identity, representation and making.

Jackie Gendel’s repetitive use of forms is both narrative and decorative. The sequencing found in her small watercolor paintings shows women in action, moving through the world with a fluid, dynamic energy in the process of becoming. These rhythmic forms echo textile designs and reference historic painters such as Sonia Delaunay, Jane Kaufman and Joyce Kozloff. Installed on wallpaper designed by Gendel, the paintings invite conversation with practices found in interior design and home decoration.

For Lovie Olivia a preoccupation with domestic interiors involves intersectional investigation of narratives, from examining Southern hospitality to revealing histories of queer women of color. She creates unique surfaces through repeated layering of plaster and pigments in her fresco-secco paintings. Simultaneously fragile and fortified, the results of Olivia’s excavations and mark-making suggest a material metaphor of how experiences overlap and identities are formed.

Yana Payusova’s work reflects both her cultural heritage and training in traditional Russian realist painting; it blends the styles and symbols of folk art, icons, graphic posters, illustration & comics. The mundane activities depicted on her ceramic tiles and vessels, such as women doing the washing up or sitting under the hairdryer at the salon, are countered by gold luster highlights. Through this gesture, Payusova’s ordinary heroines become mythical protagonists in painted three-dimensional form. 

Alexis Pye challenges traditions in portraiture to express the Black body outside of social constructs. She explores pastoral representations of the figure in gardens and parks, and integrates mixed media within painting in the form of embroidery or punch-stitch needlework. By eschewing stereotypically urban depictions of the Black body and instead embracing landscapes or other relaxing scenes of entertainment and pleasure that she has experienced herself, Pye attempts to evoke feelings of playfulness, wonder and joy in blackness.

Populating the space between figuration and abstraction, the women in Keer Tanchak’s paintings often appear ambiguous or out of reach. From fashion models and movies stars to royalty, her appropriated portrait subjects inhabit an iconic space that exudes luxury and pleasure. Tanchak’s reversal of the male gaze reveals a staging or branding of women’s identity through fashion and entertainment; from capturing exuberantly wallpapered interiors in a Catherine Deneuve movie to showcasing the millinery range of Princess Diana.

Installation images by Kay Seedig.