Girls Time (Heartbreak Hotel), 2020

Archival flatbed print on PVC marine vinyl, with acrylic paint, paper bags, Pentelic marble dust, Greek canvas, fabric from Walmart, and American linen, mounted on handcrafted pine awning structure with brass hooks and grommets
© Tomashi Jackson; courtesy the artist, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and Tilton Gallery, New York. Photo by Marten Elder.

Since 2011, Katz has been making paintings of roosters that she refers to as “cock paintings,” relishing the discomfort of the term. As she has acknowledged, these works reference the male ego: “The paintings are about masculinity, and about trying to work out the iconography of power, and the attraction to it.” The Other Side depicts a rooster in motion through a series of overlapping silhouettes, speed- ing from left to right in a way that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic studies of moving forms. In each of the “cock paintings,” Katz sprinkles grains of rice onto the canvas and paints over them, creating an impasto texture that reinforces the works’ materiality in the face of painterly illusion. The title and imagery of The Other Side draw on the timeless antihumor of the road-crossing chicken.