Tag: Whitney Claflin

Solo Shows

Em Davenport’s atavistic feminism

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Chicago-based Em Davenport is a Gen-Z-er, still in her twenties, yet her solo show “love,” held over at Galerie Nicolas Robert, reveals a knowing old soul, hip to what got us here. Virtually all her novel paintings radiate the sardonic epiphanies of 1970s women, cued by their titles and brought home by their execution. Constrained and not quite defiant, they’re like characters in the New Hollywood films of Altman, Ashby, Cassavetes, Nichols, Rafelson, and Scorsese – acknowledging, a shade passively, a degree of deference to condescending male-gazers. One grim suggestion is that this generation’s incarnation of the counterculture could, despite the fire lit under it, turn in on itself as its forerunner did.

Solo Shows

Lina McGinn’s whimsical gravitas

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Dear John” – Lina McGinn’s absorbing and ostensibly playful solo show of sculptures at the expansive Europa Gallery in the Two Bridges neighborhood – manifests fine technique and a conceptual sensibility deeper than it might first appear. Using fiberglass resin and polymerized gypsum to isolate and fix discarded and distressed cardboard boxes in a range of anthropomorphic poses, she achieves something quite familiar in art – the personification of inanimate objects – in a singularly inventive way. 

Solo Shows

Whitney Claflin: Forever young

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Whitney Claflin’s work, now on view in her solo exhibition “Pinky’s Where” at Derosia, is winningly deceptive, like the title’s double-entendre. Consider the paintings Emma in Tarzana and Mr. Triste. At first blush, they seem nonchalantly wise-ass and a little frustrating, the first an offhand quip about internet celebrity and influencer supreme Emma Chamberlain, and the second…