In a sequence of four paintings, Witt Fetter continues to reflect on the contemporary condition of images in American visual culture. Through a repetition of color, form, and compositional structure, the paintings build a network of historic moments arranged in unexpected relation to each other. The work exists somewhere between genre and history painting—specific people, places and events are depicted in their afterlives as mutated fragments.
An artifact of mid-aughts pop culture folds into the lenticular surface of a windshield sun reflector. A public reassurance of safety following a falsely issued missile alert obfuscates a reality of ongoing disaster. A photograph of government and military officials during the raid to capture and kill Osama Bin Laden is cropped into a still life of abstracted violence and war fought under fluorescent lights. A hundred-year-old tragedy, the sinking of the Titanic, dissolves into the shape of an inflatable bouncy slide.
In her ongoing body of work, Fetter continues to study the forces that give shape to modern life. She contends with an experience of the world as simultaneously speeding up and slowing down. Even as the present appears to accelerate, increasingly refracting and scattering the light that illuminates the past, the inertia of the status quo feels stronger than ever before. The upward flight towards personal and communal transcendence stands in blinding contrast to the horror of global precarity and violence. These paintings emerge out of the artist’s perception of her own reality as an illusion of total equilibrium. In the eye of the storm, a rocket launches on a bed of quicksand.
Witt Fetter (b. 1994, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Fierman, New York (2023) and Estrella, New York (2022). Group exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2023); GEMS, New York (2023); Fierman, New York (2023); and Simone Subal, New York (2022). This is her first solo exhibition at the gallery.
