Karma is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by New York-based painter Cassandra MacLeod.

The exhibition consists of a group of paintings created via the use of various manual, mechanical and digital processes. In contrast to the spontaneity of the artist’s earlier paintings, these works employ a restrictive and methodical procedure in which photocopied images culled from both art historical sources and various found illustrated imagery are deliberately distorted. Exploiting the scanner’s ability to capture everything it sees, MacLeod manipulates and moves her source material over the glass to create a disfigured kinetic rendition of its original. This action demonstrates a malfunction of digital processes and highlights the potential for the misappropriation of digital information. The picture is not static and its meaning is not predetermined.

The distorted reproduction is transferred to a mesh screen and printed on canvas—another layer of the procedure where the limitations of the process encourage loss in translation. Spray paint and washes of color are used to obscure and sometimes conceal the intentional mistakes. MacLeod repeatedly uses imagery of women’s faces copied from the paintings of Fernand Léger. Expressionless and devoid of individual features, Léger’s renderings are intentionally unsentimental in a way that demonstrates the artist’s interest in dethroning the subject to mere object in a landscape. In MacLeod’s paintings these images become a visual device for Léger’s progressive ideas of freedoms in painting. This gentle nod to the Cubist’s breakdown of the subject-object paradigm is reflected by MacLeod’s characteristic process of painting.

These works physically subvert idealized visions of feminine beauty and challenge traditional representations of gender. As the figures bend on themselves, are twisted, disgraced and physically exhausted to the point of becoming caricatures, they confuse the gaze which originally conceived them.

Cassandra MacLeod opens on Saturday, November 9, 2013 with an artists reception from 6 to 8pm. An artist book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition, in an edition of 100 signed and numbered copies, which will be
available for purchase at the opening.