Jay DeFeo. Formal Binaries
Jay DeFeo was relentlessly experimental. Her visual and poetic associations play across a remarkable array of media and material, including painting, drawing, metal sculpture, jewelry, and photography, which was a critical facet of her process. The camera’s distancing properties offered the artist new tools for focusing and framing; for manipulating tonality, perspective, and scale; and for fixating on texture. In an untitled studio still life from 1971 of a cauliflower, egg, and mirror, DeFeo evocatively used objects to explore the thematic continuities that transgress distinctions in subject matter and medium: void and surface, dark and light, oval and rectangular, and rough and smooth.