Angela Blattner recreates the novelty, dynamism, and excitement intrinsic to lived experience — especially in urban settings. Capturing impromptu moments, chance encounters, and other glimpses into social and organic processes in different stages of their unfolding, Blattner utilizes perspective as her primary tool, embedding her pictures in a sort of formal commentary that relies less on what is seen than the way in which it is portrayed. Generally working with painterly media such as acrylics and watercolors, objects in Blattner’s works are never isolated entities, but contain the whole world within themselves, like visual synecdoches of social and cultural life.
In New York 2, Blattner uses a downward-looking perspective, rendered in severe black and white tones, to express the hurried pace of life in New York, delineating the sometimes painful anonymity that the city inflicts on its denizens. Rather than singling out the viewer as another nameless outsider, Blattner shows that this feeling of anonymity is shared. In this particular work, everyone is a copy of themselves; the same solid black color that forms a person’s body also forms his insubstantial shadow.
