P·P·O·W is pleased to announce Sequel, our seventh show of works by Dotty Attie and the follow-up to her exhibition in 2003 entitled Sometimes a Traveler. 

In Sequel, Dotty Attie explores the different cultural contexts around both our individual and social wants and desires.  Each work is comprised of a series of 6 x 6 inch methodically glazed oil paintings.  In this series Attie appropriates images from war footage to celebrity images to her own home snap shots.  She then uses these photographs as the basis for her photo-real paintings.  By painting and juxtaposing her sources, Attie recontextualizes images that have become somewhat benign in our society.  Like the paintings from Sometimes a Traveler, each of these meticulously painted grids is divided by smaller rectangular paintings of text:

Sometimes a traveler in foreign lands
Where customs and mores are unfamiliar
Will find to his surprise
That in certain places
And in certain times
Resistance
And refusal
Mean consent
 

Attie follows her previous series with the exploration of a social double talk.  She investigates the same question: when do social behaviors appear both positive and negative within the same context?  In Sequel, Attie’s noir-toned paintings search subjects such as the persistence of the paparazzi vs. their connection to the power of fame, the desire for beauty vs. the pain inflicted in that pursuit, our desire to create machines to conquer vast distances in travel vs. the need to use them to conquer others in war, to the basic responsibility of disciplining a child out of love for their greater education. 

Dotty Attie has been exhibiting in museums and galleries worldwide since 1972.  Her paintings are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.