White Columns Online #28:
Lookers
curated by Marie Catalano

In Renaissance depictions of St. Lucy, the virgin martyr offers a powerful attribute: a plate of eyeballs sunny-side up to symbolize her devotion to the protection of sight. The disembodied eye was also notably the emblem of contemporaneous artist and theorist Leon Battista Alberti: on coinage bearing his profile, one can make out a tiny eye floating below his chin outlined in wavy eyelashes—rays, in fact— illustrating the Renaissance belief that eyes could grab or possess whoever they gaze upon. The Surrealists often isolated eyes in their work to represent sexuality and the disassociation from subjectivity and self-consciousness. Following this long lineage of symbolism, Lise Sosklone’s seductive and uncanny grayscale painting of Eyeballs/Eggs flatly harnesses the allure of vacancy. The four makers in this exhibition are similarly engaged with plucking artifacts from popular culture that entice and embody the act of looking. Wedding gowns, shoes, ribbons, sequins, the female form and other symbols and icons that promise magic or transcendence through commercial means are offered up in the works collected here.

Like eyes without a face, the items depicted exhibit a literal or figurative hollowness and desubjectification. In Megan Mi-Ai Lee’s So No One May Enter (After Howard Hughes), a silver shoe covered in lightbulbs replicates a hotel sign on the Vegas Strip that tormented the film producer who believed he was being spied on from the shoe’s empty interior. The ghostly wedding gowns conjured by Lisa Armstrong Noble articulate bodily forms but float devoid of brides. In Ingrid Lu’s Disco Lamp, a delicately tied ribbon marks what might be the waist of her painting: a field of colorful cosmological light flares that resemble the hazy glow of a nightclub or galactic expanse. While flaunting commercialized trappings of desire, the artists present their romanticized and codified subjects at a stark remove. By leaving the body behind, the works cast light on an amorphous realm of fantasy and projection.

Marie Catalano is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She was most recently a partner at JTT, a contemporary art gallery in New York, where she worked from 2015-2023. Catalano holds an MA in Art History from Hunter College where she produced a master’s thesis on Art Across the Park (1980 and 1982), an outdoor exhibition of ephemeral installations and performances in New York City parks. She is currently an adjunct professor at NYU and an associate at Adams and Ollman in Portland, OR.

This exhibition is the twenty-eighth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.