A catalogue essay on the series Stranger in Paradise by Allison Zuckerman, the Rubell Family Collection (RFC), Miami, softcover, 96 pages, December 2017

Allison Zuckerman was the 2017 artist-in-residence at the Rubell Family Collection. During the summer of 2017 she created Stranger in Paradise – a series of ten large format paintings – using the RFC’s main gallery as her studio. 

This new series is the ultimate manifestation of the term pastiche. Zuckerman blends historical paintings and internet culture, utilizing paint and digitally manipulated printed images to create hybridized portraits suffused with cultural and societal critiques. In my essay, I examined the organized chaos that defines this series through two different prisms: that of feminist practices of appropriation, and that of the grotesque.