8/22/2025
Grey is the weight of the sky passing overhead.
Grey is a single note degrading into silence.
Grey is the color of thought.
A wash of slate grey follows the waxy yellow pallor of the faces of newly deceased persons of influence or otherwise. Grey in its warmth, exemplifying the ochre-dusted concrete underfoot.
Dust like the warm-toned face makeup powdered atop the cheeks of the embalmed, asleep in mortuary basements. They are dolls in perpetual stupor. They are grey warmed. The cold marble, the heavy sky, the empty nonchalance. This is the faceless. It holds no pallor, no depiction, no resemblance to anything human. Standing, petting the wall, unaware of anything besides its cold temperature. Averting its faceless gaze.
These faceless dolls are strewn about the attics of Shelley Uckotter with small tongues of light licking upwards through the slats of floorboards groaning underfoot. It’s the color of light’s unfamiliarity with her skin; so tight and young yet clinging to rotting limbs. A brush with the slick integument of a shark.
Catherine Mulligan then, with her lovely ladies of noble rot, hagspoloited to oblivion, cures her women until their skin dries, flakes, and is blown away by the wind. Her trailer park Bratz babes are tonally tempered in layers of splotched spray tan and shimmering eyeshadow. Their necrosis a personification of Zombie Formalism. Decay is caricatured and spliced between life and death in a state occupied solely by the surgically botched. The blissfully surrealistic body given to your choice of god as a vestigial virgin. Surgery is sex. Sacrificed to some catatonic power in the downy grey light of dawn. Shrouded by a heavy fog, this is witching hour for the truly morose, so dedicated to their charge, they sacrifice their souls every time they go under the knife. No anesthesia is needed, for they are self-sedated.
Soft hands position the frame and sculpt figures from wet clay, from which Theo Mackenzie makes his faceless dolls. Held hostage in the limerence of God’s workshop as an Instagram avatar left unchosen. Gently kneaded, they are modeled in self-conscious positions while the tightly cropped compositions recall crime scene photography. Mannequins arranged with knees bent and cheeks turned away choked by their own imposition: numb to surprise. They seem aware of their incomplete visage being their perfection. Sheltered from completion in suspended adolescence, inhabiting a pearlescent aura of potential.
“There is a thing about a… an unfinished piece of work, a… a thing like this where… do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it’s there, it’s there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it.” – William Gaddis
In painting, nothing is as sexy, as promising, as delicious as the brink of completion. Tinged with its nondescript affinity to host projections of all sorts. Its clay-like plasticity is so alluring.
In sprawling studies, these grey dolls are desexed by Arthur Marie and laid out in pathological rhythms. They recall the practice of portraiture developed in the Renaissance, wherein paintings would be completed first only tonally, then washed in thin layers of pigment to achieve the correct coloring. His tone, captured in mute opulence, begets a dismissal of baroquely splendid color as rather unpuritanical. Greed of the eye breeds gluttony of the soul. Akin to the fasting rituals of monastic faith to purge insolent sins.
The obtuse posturing and cropped alien compositions of Mackenzie and Uckotter mirror the removal of spatial familiarity with phenomenological imposition, further exasperated by their desaturation. The grey heralds the dissociation implicit within the imagery. There is a scavenging there, digging around the sun-bleached and threadbare artifacts in search of the muse within this rubble of imagery.