On the occasion of Angela Dufresne’s solo exhibition “Long and Short Shots” at Yosi Milo Gallery, Professor Melissa Ragona organized and will moderate the conversation “Parent Traps and Tarnished Angels: A Discussion of Angela Dufresne’s New Paintings.” The panel, taking place virtually on February 18 at 6:00 PM ET, includes Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake and Dufresne.

The conversation will address the diverse shapes or unpredictable forces that inform a kind of “dirty phenomenology” at play in Dufresne’s work. What is the slippage between intention and visible evidence—between, erotic charge and the effects of such libidinal energy? To borrow from Samuel Delany, how can we pose challenges to the “institutionalization of interpretation” and to advance more surprising, unpredictable futures in our approaches to bodies, genders, sexualities, and communities? Dufresne’s work, in step with contemporaries such as Jennifer Packer, Caitlin Cherry, and Nicole Eisenman, proposes pushing corporeality into a techno-psychic sublime where delineations between figure and ground, color and shape dissolve, reform, and snap back at discursive orders of disciplined bodies. In step with Charles Bernstein’s idea of a “homophonic translation,” Dufresne is interested in “smuggling rogue,” and seeming disparate ideas, forms, contents, into the conventions of narrative painting so that only something like an experimental cinematic sensibility can capture the speed and agility of her painterly transliteration.