Events

Believing that figurative painting can articulate identity through both humor and pathos, Barbara Ishikura uses portraiture to examine how the female body navigates social expectation, class performance, and historically gendered space. Working within—and against—the legacy of the male gaze, Ishikura positions herself as a female painter depicting women who refuse passive objecthood. Her figures strike poses borrowed from art history, yet their drooping breasts, dangling cigarettes, and unabashed sexuality disrupt the idealized nude. They inhabit interiors long coded as feminine—the boudoir, the drawing room, the cultivated garden—spaces once defined by restriction and decorum, where women were displayed and confined. By reoccupying these sites, Ishikura transforms them from spaces of containment into arenas of agency.

In lush, vibrant compositions, cheap beer cans and working-class detritus coexist with velvet drapery, damask wallpaper, houseplants, books, and ornamental dogs. This collision of high and low destabilizes hierarchies of taste, exposing refinement and vulgarity as socially constructed and deeply gendered categories. Ishikura’s women indulge openly: they sprawl, smoke, and meet the viewer’s gaze. Through this contemporary, hedonistic critique, the paintings question who has historically controlled representations of pleasure, propriety, and the female body—and who controls them now. In Plain Sight reframes visibility from a condition of objectification into a condition of agency.

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