American Dream, 1990

Miami Beach 2018
American Dream

P.P.O.W

Painting
Oil on wood
61.0 x 45.7 (厘米)
24.0 x 18.0 (吋)
A respected feminist artist who gained recognition during the early 1990s, Ellen Cantor worked prolifically in drawing, video art, film, painting, and sculpture. She was also a writer and curator. While her work was unflinchingly explicit, even more so for its faux naivete, it was not intended to arouse. Rather, it addressed the politics of sex and love, fusing autobiography and fiction by appropriating graphic images from arthouse cinema with more chaste symbols sourced from fairy tales, animated films, and Hollywood musicals. Uniquely attuned to the simultaneity of virtue and vice, Cantor’s most intimate works were large, often narrative series of mixed-media drawings that are by turns aggressive, whimsical, and raw. Her works on paper from the mid-90s, in concert with a selection of contemporaneous paintings, connect the language of her influential video montage pieces and wall drawings to her lesser-known two-dimensional objects. This presentation coincides with the publication of a new monograph, Ellen Cantor: A history of the world as it has become known to me.