Hilary Harkness: Everything for You
By Wendy Olsoff, Lynne Tillman, Ashley Jackson, Ivy Haldeman
Black Dog Press and P·P·O·W
The painter’s comprehensive monograph, which spans nearly 25 years, could not arrive soon enough for an audience primed by her knock-out show last year. At P·P·O·W, Hilary Harkness presented a suite of small canvases for which she took Winslow Homer’s 1866 Civil War scene Prisoners from the Front as a point of departure—her speculative series proposed an alternate history of Homer’s painting, inspired, in part, by her wife’s ancestry. Narratively scrambled, pictorially complex queer worlds have long been Harkness’s métier, the scope of her dazzling, detailed work shows. Strange, painstakingly rendered pictures, like transmissions from lesbian corners of the multiverse—cross-sections of battleships manned by women and imagined moments shared by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas—demand the kind of close study that, luckily, this beautiful volume affords.