AMANDA WALL

In “Portraits and Repetition” (1935), Gertrude Stein, famed avant-garde poet and author, exclaimed that “nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see... The thing that is important is the way that portraits of men and women, and children are written, by written I mean made. And by made I mean felt.” Originally published as part of Stein’s “Lectures in America,” in defense of what critics noted as her use of repetition in her literary portraits of artists, Stein argued for the distinction between repetition and insistence (or emphasis) and claimed that her repetitions were slightly different each time. Through a process of altering repetitions, we can understand a greater depth to Stein’s subjects. In the slight variation, sometimes even nearly undetectable in their shift, the subject is captured through a different lens.

Today, in a world highly mediated through digital images, the notion of layering a subject (and subsequent fracturing) remains an incredibly potent concept in constructing a sitter or self. Through her paintings, Amanda Wall speaks to the question of portraiture for her generation, imagining compositions guided by the frame of a screen or the memory of subjects seen or documented through digital means. Laden within these painterly studies of form is an investigation into twenty-first-century existentialism and isolation instigated by our digital age. However, her mark is not digital or cold; instead, a sensual swatch of figures dripping into each other and morphing into new forms, marked by lurid colors and flashes of light in the shape of stars and butterflies–a ripe compilation of youth.

In ‘Beddy Bye’,__Wall presents a new suite of paintings taken from the vantage point of being in bed or of figures or objects nestled together within the sheets–a group of boys whose faces are pressed together, piles of girls caressing and falling into each other, of cherries intertwined with cables, and bullet casings which at a glance, could be mistaken for lipsticks, what Wall noted over Zoom as the “ultimate still life.” This is her first exhibition where her paintings feature multiple figures, though she explained that she “doesn’t necessarily see them as different people. It was more of this idea of a fragmented self in this fractured reality space.” The subjects are also imagined, or at least non-specific sitters–characters from Wall’s memory that are an amalgamation of friends, figures seen online, photos on Instagram, and her own likeness from mirrors, camera rolls, and memory.

As our memories today are subjected to frequent visions of screens, they are often guided by the frames cut by a camera roll or app. The digital dimension mitigates our perspective of the corporeal. Our frame has shifted through a digital viewfinder. In the exhibition’s titular painting, the characters blend into each other, with the figure on the right seemingly emerging from the sheet and falling into each successive figure, a tangle of limbs and hair that intertwines in the center. The resulting feeling is reminiscent of scrolling through a series of photos on a phone in quick succession or the result of an image produced by AI prompts, actions that are both deeply embedded in today’s reality and dissociated from a physical realm.

For Wall, like many, the bed is a safe place of retreat from the world and a site to grapple with the concept of self. The presence of multiple figures represents a series of repetitions with varying emphasis, an exercise in imagining multiple fragments or forms of a single identity, a continuous process of metamorphosis. However, Wall’s is also a generation where the landscape of our private and public lives is irrevocably intertwined. Never before have more people worked from home or even from bed, transforming it beyond a place of rest or sex but into a site of potential productivity. In grounding the exhibition around the bed, Wall places her sitters or avatars in the most complex landscape to host the meeting of the physical and digital.

— Sam Ozer, curator, producer, and writer.