Art

Judy Fox: Harvest

In Alan Alda’s movie The Four Seasons (1981), which is about three couples who’ve vacationed together for years, one of the wives is a photographer who’s made a specialty of shooting vegetables. It’s meant to express her ennui, the vegetative state of her marriage, but the idea, à la Irving Penn, has legs. I thought of this in light of “Judy Fox: Harvest,” an exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery. Here are more vegetables, but they are made of terra-cotta and casein paint, and they speak to our current moment, when humanity is finally feeling the backlash generated by two centuries of Earth abuse. Lungs that look like old broccoli (but also the forests that give us oxygen, if only we would stop cutting them down). A hand that could be a squash, but either way it’s blighted. A human head that’s as blind as a potato. Fox’s work is botanical, surreal, and prophetic—a disorienting harvest.

— Laura Jacobs

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