There is something about the crushing malaise that, for so many, define the times we live in. As Americans, we (for the most part with obvious exceptions) live in a privileged society with easy access to a multitude of resources and creature comforts. We are also inundated with media in the form news, advertising, film, television, and video games, as well as the distractions of social media that frequently border on the pathologically narcissistic. 

        We are granted the ecstasy of endless entertainment and sensory pleasure while we become further alienated from real life experiences that are truer and more gratifying, albeit harder fought for. Shared systems of value and morality have begun to dissolve, fracturing identities and making individuals more vulnerable to having their own sense of self projected onto them through screens and devices, turning up the pressure to assert themselves in an unpredictable ‘move fast and break things’ world. 

        It is in this augmented and transformed reality that we are confronted with some the harsher truths our humanity. The paintings of Lindsey Kircher embody this feeling in many ways, albeit in a style and with subject matter that are specific to certain subcultural veins, histories rife with gender politics, and a visual vocabulary that reads as both nostalgic and cursed. Chicago’s Oliva gallery presents eight of the most recent examples of Kircher’s visceral explorations into this fraught sensory realm the exhibition ’Girl Talk’. 

        At a glance, one could easily associate the paintings with rock and roll aesthetics. Tattoo-Esque hard lines and vibrant colors give weighty life to familiar and loaded imagery like fishnet stockings, motorcycles, guitars, and high heel shoes to name a few. It is exactly the loaded quality of Kircher’s subject matter that drives these pieces beyond their immediate cultural references. How these images are constructed makes a deeper truth embedded within them land with a heavy thud. 

        The compositions are both alluring and repelling. This work can draw in the viewer with rhythmic forms, shadowy spaces, and dissonant color palette only to implicate them with a gaze in which the female body is both objectified and commodified. 

        Faces, limbs, and breasts are hacked together and piled alongside objects like a pleather handbag, a birthday cake, a football helmet, and more. These seem to be culled from an endless index of consumer goods and well-trod cultural staples that are fixed in the American psyche, even sometimes dated. Kircher seems to be mining this history rather than presenting the current moment that it has brought us to.

        A striking example is one of the five larger paintings titled Fountain of Youth which depicts an elaborate structure of female presenting body parts, mostly legs, as well as a fair number of breasts. Cartoonish spurts of water flow from various points on the structure, including objects like a conch shell or a pink tulip. The whole apparatus appears to be anchored on one, mostly whole, young woman whose ambivalent facial expression and tilted body suggest her exhaustion with having to bear an oppressive burden. In this case youth. This notion is complicated by the green skin tone of the fragmented figures that is both monstrous and reminiscent of oxidized bronze, suggesting the impermanence of youth and the ways in which we memorialize and desperately hold on to.

        These paintings lack imagery that evokes our immediate and contemporary 21^st century moment. There are no screens, no digitization or advanced technology. The fashion feels vintage across the spectrum of clothing, hairstyle, and accessories (with the exception of a lone Labubu). This is likely because Kutcher pulls her imagery from popular magazines mostly from the 80’s and 90’s. Fashion and lifestyle publications like cosmopolitan to soft core porn like Playboy are key sources. Studies are done in collage that inform the final paintings in which these composite human structures seem to exist in an undead state, placed in liminal spaces that, like the figures, are fragmented and familiarly coded with specific imagery. 

        This is particularly apparent in a piece titled ‘Be Careful What You Wish for, You Just Might Get It’. Also, one of the five larger works, it stands out from the others not only because of its more ambiguous title, but for the more evocative space, which references a retro dive bar. The mess of disjointed bodies holds a pool cue, as a stiletto booted leg kneels on a rug with billiard balls strewn on the floor. An amber colored stained-glass lamp (I don’t think it’s Tiffany) hangs in the corner casting a bile-colored light on the central figure(s), adding dimension. The more ominous title makes this space feel all the more haunting and dangerous. 

        But this work is not purely horrific or unnerving. It is curious and exploratory. In digging into print media of the past Kircher is in conversation with the women on the other side of the camera lens. Hence the title of the exhibition. She is also mindful of art history and the fact that women painting women is a 20th century innovation, which though tragic is unsurprising given historical patterns that excluded women from skilled trades and education. 

        When it comes to execution this work has the idiosyncratic touch of the human hand that makes even abstract figurative painting resonant with lived experience. For better or worse, this conveys the essence of the subjects; the handling of the paint itself feels constrained, put in a box. Much like the vacant faces that emerge from these hybrid forms, the images themselves feel oppressed by, and perhaps in rebellion of, certain aesthetic standards dictated by art world gatekeepers who deem some artists’ work valid and viable over others. 

        This may not be Kircher’s intention and perhaps the handling of the paint could be less constrained. We do not see any drips or heavy impasto. The use of hard lines and shading is ever-present, and the underpainting can read as zombie abstraction. However, this works for these pieces if the conceptual framework is that of female identity and self-image filtered through a dehumanizing capitalist lens.

        There seems to be an iterative progression taking place in this body of work. Kircher mentioned in her talk that Cat Lady was the earliest example in this set of eight pieces. It is by far the most loosely painted and abstract. The rest of the work becomes more defined, more modulated, and more abundant with subject matter in a way that clearer narratives take shape within each composition. 

        Kircher also revealed that a professor once told her that she is more of a draftsman than a painter. This distinction is absurd on its face given the obvious connection between painting and drawing that dates as far back as the Lascaux caverns. When asked why she is drawn to painting she responded with an answer most painters can relate to; it is the immersive and seductive quality of paint that is so captivating. 

        The immersive quality of the larger works is reinforced by the smaller ones. Kircher described pieces such as In The Weeds, Lap Dog, and Head Over Heels as details or close ups of what might make one of the larger pieces. These images do not conform to the scale of the substrate. It is almost as if each rectangle, regardless of size, serves as a kind of x-ray screen that reveals an inner world, like the glasses in John Carpenter’s They Live!.

        There are many layers to Kircher’s work. She is mining the depths of figuration, abstraction, pop culture, subculture, mass media, and Americana. This maximalism speeds the viewer down a narrow highway on a clear and singular path, arriving at a painterly destination in which the experience of being a woman in modern day America is made manifest in a grotesquely electric fashion.

        These are analog renditions of embodied experience. What we see the world and are inundated by media can be numbing and exhausting. But we must remind ourselves that our lives are our own and that media can only control us as much as we let it. It tends to be artists who remind us that when we immerse ourselves in such things and take them on, that we become more capable of working through them and hopefully coming out on the other side, more whole and more connected to what makes us human. 

Evan Carter is a visual artist, writer, and Associate Editor at the New Art Examiner. He received and MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art & Design.