Published in conjunction with Angela Dufresne’s solo exhibition “Making A Scene” at the Kemper Museum of Art, Professor Melissa Ragona‘s essay “Blink, Cut, Surrender: Angela Dufresne’s Poltergeist” appears in the exhibition catalogue.
Ragona analyzes Angela Dufresne’s painting as it moves from her early work which was inspired by “movie sets” and cinematic tropes, i.e. in the films of John Cassavetes, Luchino Visconti, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (just to name a few)—to the vast, complex recent works in which larger questions about mediated systems come to the fore. What drives viewing impulses? Who are these mass audiences? How are they generated? What are the possible structures of desire and the politics of their representation, their precarity?