Exposing our insatiable longing for the ideal, the work of Julia Jacquette, who is based in New York and Amsterdam, focuses on commercialized objects of desire: liquor and food, ornate interiors of the wealthy, shimmering swimming pools, and deceptively flawless women. Utilizing images from glossy lifestyle magazines, luxury brand catalogs, and 1950s and 1960s cookbooks, Jacquette renders these objects with photorealist precision, often in views so close that the subject becomes abstracted. Her crisply detailed paintings question the seductive attraction of consumer goods, the unattainable perfection of feminine beauty, and the ways that advertising influences our feelings of identity and self-worth.

Original gouache drawings from Jacquette’s graphic memoir, Playground of My Mind, will be on view concurrently in the Joe and Marité Robinson Strolling Gallery. Providing a distinctive account of the artist’s childhood, the book is inspired by the “adventure playgrounds” of the 1970s that encouraged constructive, imaginative play. In this memoir, Jacquette acknowledges the influence of these and other design principles that she absorbed growing up in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s.

Julia Jacquette: Unrequited and Acts of Play is an abridged version of an exhibition organized by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, where it was on view February 18 – July 2, 2017. It was curated by Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director of the Wellin Museum.

Graphic memoirists use comics or sequential art to tell personal stories in highly focused ways. Drawing It Out highlights the work of six artists— Julia Alekseyeva, Alison Bechdel, Lucy Knisley, Jennifer McClory, MariNaomi, and Lauren Purje—who use this genre to convey their unique voices and experiences. The exhibition features a selection of original drawings and a video animation by MariNaomi. Visitors may look through all of the books that correspond to the drawings on display. A bookshelf in the gallery includes all of the books highlighted in the exhibition, as well as additional examples by other graphic memoirists.

Élan Cadiz created this pendant or brooch-shaped collage with fragments of beauty advertisements published from the 1930s through the 1980s. By placing a portrait of her grandmother, Dorothy C. Scruggs at the center of the composition, she makes her not only the focus of the work, but also the target of the condescending ads for the “beauty” products that surround her—ads that used lines such as “Nobody loves a dark, muddy skin,” and “Women crave lightness.” Cadiz states, “This was her reality, and like the burning sizzle of a hot comb, her self-love was seared out of her with every thick, wavy strand made straight. So much so that five decades later, when ads read ‘Beauty comes in many colors,’ generations of Black women like Ms. Dorothy were still worried about good hair and dark skin.”

This season’s Stair-gazing was selected by Guest Curator, Henone Kassaye Girma.