7445 N. Campbell Chicago, IL 60645                773.458.3150                [email protected]

Monica Rezman

           

                 

           

                 

           

     

Building upon her sustained investigation of hair as a substance linked to rituals of femininity and the beauty industry, Monica Rezman's recent body of work treats her signature motif in a more abstract manner. Hair, in these new works, is the basis for ruminations on organic processes, the nature of creativity, and the language of gestural abstraction. In her previous drawings the dark strands are isolated against a blank background, (and) in the current works they expand to fill the sheet, proliferating alongside colored shapes, patterns, and streamers. In certain passages, the hair itself becomes an armature for colored facets, like the leading of stained glass. The result is optical confusion, whereby the hair is at once outline and object, appearing alternately in front of the colored forms or fused with them.

Unlike the open lacework of hair that fills the works on paper, the canvases titled Algeny depict closed forms that might be read as organisms of sorts, cobbled together from fragments of Rezman's hair drawings and painted shapes. The stacks of polygons in Rezman's Algeny paintings take on sculptural dimensions in her most recent works, migrating from the flat space of the canvas to the real space of the room. Variously painted solid colors or sprouting snarled masses of charcoal hair, Rezman's new paper constructions appear as prototypes of some mysterious creature with both robotic and organic components. These hairy, geometric figures are almost always upright and composed of at least three segments, which might stand for a head, thorax, and tail.
Excerpted from the recent essay New Work by Antonia Pocock