Juliana Huxtable at Project Native Informant

In her 2nd solo exhibition at Undertaking Native Informant, “AKIMBO SPITTLE,” Juliana Huxtable gives the ancient approach of palimpsest a computer software update. She slicks paint over her pores and skin in wild patterns and poses theatrically for the camera, getting many self-portraits in her studio. She then prints the pictures on to substantial canvases and paints more than them. Every single image delivers a crystallization, an archaeology, of media. Really do not request regardless of whether Huxtable is a performer, photographer, or painter: Settle for that she is all the things all at at the time.

Within just the five paintings on display screen right here, Huxtable utilizes acrylics as one may well Photoshop, supplying herself wings, talons, and hooves to boost and abstract her human body, bringing it nearer to how she sees herself. Graduating from Tumblr to the “metaverse,” Huxtable attire for the new chopping-edge in a kaleidoscope of animal prints, these types of as those people worn by VR avatars. The artist has been overtly seduced by electronic life the exhibition displays her ongoing fascination with online “zoosexuality.” In quite a few techniques, the cosplay fetish of furries is but a up to date figuration of the fantastical creatures populating mythology.

The come across in between the human and the bestial on the level of Huxtable’s system attracts focus to the boundaries of identity in the tales culture tells itself. Centering herself in these paintings formally and conceptually, the artist mythologizes her have image, utilizing themes of futurity to recast the presiding narratives about the bodies we inhabit.