Becky Kolsrud

installation view, Elegies, JTT, New York

With a limited palette and a strict lexicon of images, this Los Angeles-based painter brushes into existence a mythic, metaphysical realm of O’Keeffian horizons, blobby clouds, high heels, and salmon-colored women. The centerpiece of her exhibition “Elegies,” at the JTT gallery, is a fifteen-foot-long panorama, completed in 2021. Titled “The Chorus,” it can be read as an allegory of the past year of isolation and mourning. A body of water is dotted with small islands, populated by cypress trees whose trunks are human legs; an open casket floats in the center of the composition. In another, smaller landscape, bordered by a band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon blares from the corner. On the floor, Kolsrud has installed a sculptural counterpart to her canvases—an expanse of mannequin feet in clear plastic mules—as if to suggest that every utopian Eden or Lesbos has a dystopia lurking beneath.