Chapter 12: iamb, 2008
... Like actual vision, Quaytman’s paintings have a blind spot, whether it be from a light source in the picture, an optical illusion, a trompe l’œil effect, the absence of color in a black and white photograph, or the picture in plan. This recurring ‘absence’ enables the works to activate one another, yet it also often shifts the axis of legibility between neighboring paintings. While the paintings can suggest an alternate position for the viewer’s body moving by the picture, or, further, literally repel vision through optical static, they ultimately affirm their own autonomy. While it can be said that they are made to influence flow from one picture to the next, no single painting suggests what the next will be. Each work allows the viewer to look at and into it, to focus from near and far, to see it as part of a group or in isolation. In the end, the picture always actively refers back to the painting itself, and then out to all that surrounds it... (from the press release for the exhibition of the artist at Miguel Abreu Gallery in 2009)
Chapter 12: iamb (blind smile), 2008
...hers is a deliberate practice with a strong sense of the past (all four of her parents were artists) and of community (she was the director of the collaborative artist-run gallery Orchard for three years). Likewise, the tragedy, with its flickering lights in darkness, attests to the nature of Quaytman’s metaphorical systems, in which vision and disappearance, or blindness and insight, are inevitably intertwined... (+)
Chapter 12: iamb (Double Exposed Lamp), 2008
