I was first attracted to Amy Cutler's illustrations because of the weird space they seem to occupy between nonsense and some sort of strange ritual. I wasn't quite sure what to make of them. I was interested.
I stumbled across her when finding images for my post a little while back on Nikki S. Lee, whose work is carried by the Leslie Tonkonow gallery; which represents Amy Cutler. Her gouache illustrations are charming, but at the same time there is something unsettling about them. They are slightly off. Women performing mundane tasks (tasks that are particularly associated with females) are offset by slight peculiarities in the scene. (The perfect subtleness of the strangeness in her scenes can especially be seen in the first image, it took me a while to notice the women behind the trees.) The stark white absence of background leaves a large hole in the narrative which makes it clear the whole story is not being told. It makes them appear deceptively simple. They are nonetheless definitely narratives, however cryptic, or pieces of them at the very least.
Cutler at Tonkonow
images: various sources, c. Amy Cutler
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