Allison Katz, cover for Cura, Fall 2015
Over the past couple of years, Allison Katz has incorporated the nose into her works; the olfactory organ has made appearances in various guises throughout that period. The noses first arrived to replace the flowers in her painting. After all, what is a flower without a nose ? And now, a nose, or several, will sneak into a painting, or even emerge as ceramic objects. The nose for Katz operates as a mechanism; it arrives within the work to catch its scent. What the nose smells, we can’t be sure, as it has access to a sensory realm beyond our capacities, living within the stuff of paint and clay, sniffing out a contact that we viewers who are external to the work can only see.
An angular (or pudgy) bundle of bone and cartilage jutting out of the plane of the face; the nose itself is almost a sculptural intervention upon the flatness of the visage. The nose is a bridge between painting and sculpture, it sits somewhere between the flat surface of a portrait and the object-like protrusion of a bust. The extension of the nose in figurative painting is rendered in lines and shadows that refer to its known three-dimensionality, a thing jutting right out of the otherwise smooth contours of the face. The nose yearns for sculpture, and Katz knows this. But in its two-dimensional articulation, it is drawn as a simple angle that cannot fully capture the complexity of its form.
Allison Katz
It almost goes without saying; the line has a powerful capacity for shape shifting. In Katz’s hands, the line constructing the carefully studied bridge of the nose is elegant, pointed, perhaps snobby. When the noses show up en masse, in paintings or as sculptures, they form a coterie of critical viewers. Usually the rest of the face hides; the nose will be the judge. In some cases, if a profile, eyes, or mouths start to emerge, with Katz, the nose expresses most of the personality. The quickest part of the body to be offended by something unsavory, the nose, when isolated, becomes itself a strange form; silently triangular, but capable of receiving many messages.
Like the pears and bottoms that are also recurring motifs in Katz’s works, the nose is often minimized into a simple line, a suggestion that clearly indicates the reference, but could also just as easily merge into another form, with a slight modification. In her ceramic sculptures of noses, the opening of the nostrils clearly indicate that it’s a nose. The nostril is a reminder of the interior function of this orifice: air, gas, and fumes easily waft in. On the back of the sculpture, a small indentation on the bulbous seat of the nose turns it into the curve of an ass. A crack appears. A truly unfortunate, though possibly still sensuous, merger of body parts, Katz often makes sharp pairings and puns in her works.
Allison Katz
The perversity of the nose is flaunted, turned into a repeating shape as seen in the cover drawing, Katz is fixated. The nose has been sketched many times in her hand. The line comes practiced, like a signature. The quickness of the mark speaks the language of caricature. The additional curved lines, wavy but unformed, add energy and fluidity, indicating a process of becoming and undoing. The cover drawing is actually a detail, extracted from a mural measuring 4 meters in height. In that exhibition, Katz’s hand-painted bevy of noses extended into the background, covering a wall where other works of art were hung. A Lichtenstein was placed onto Katz’s surface. Again, the noses gather behind the paintings, sniffing and assessing these other works. Nosy, they pry each time they appear.
In other works, these fragmented noses enter into scenes where they freely mix with other elements, testing the limits of their legibility and visibility. An exercise in form. Outlines emphasizing the construction and immediate recognition of the shape. In these works, caricature becomes the stuff of childish jokes, with all their psychosexual implications. The style of drawing engages with simplicity, crudeness, and at times, mockery. The noses tease, they judge, and they threaten to poke out of the painting or drawing in which they are represented. Breaking from the orderly decorum of a flat plane.