Allison Katz, Interior View II, “William N. Copley”, Milan, 2016-17.

Canadian artist Allison Katz's striking paintings are now on display at Camden Art Centre, her first London-based institutional solo show that follows her solo presentation in Nottingham Contemporary last year. I was able to attend the opening this week, and it was, incidentally, not only my first exhibition in 2022 but also my first outing of the year in general. This was after the unfortunate incident of testing positive for COVID-19 on New Year's Day, a prime example of how one should not start off their year. Perhaps this contributed to the reasons why the exhibition resonated with me, where its very title, Artery, references an inside that I have too recently been confined to, reminding me of the months upon months of shared isolation we've experienced in the past two years.

The paintings included in this exhibition were all produced in the last two years of intermittent lockdown. They share a secret language that feels as if it’s on the periphery of one’s memory. It consists of exhibition posters designed by the artist and two rooms filled with cleverly placed paintings of varying sizes and subject matter.

Allison Katz, *Elevator III*, 2021, installation view.

Entering Gallery One, audiences are confronted with a true-to-life painting of a lift as if to transport us into a world that overflows with a familiarity, offset by an alienness akin to culture shock. Its placement is against a wall that features a lift on its other side. Her large canvases depict cocks, eggs, figures of humans or human-adjacent entities, texture and smoothness, objects both dimensional and flat, and snapshots of ordinary scenes overlaid or painted as if collaged together.

Throughout each image, there is a peculiar play with perspective, not just in terms of her usage and withholding of angles and shadows but in the way that the images toy with depth. I’m reminded of palimpsests, where texts are effaced to have new text written over, such as Akgraph (Tobias + Angel), which features a line drawing of a face that has letters for eyes (M, A), against a faded background of a scene with two biblical-looking figures, including one with wings and a halo. Other paintings employ her signature use of rice, or else feature frames within frames, again playing with perspective in unexpected ways.

Allison Katz, *Akgraph (Tobias + Angel)*, 2021.

When we enter Gallery Two, it is immediately revealed to us why the show is called Artery, with each front-facing painting depicting the outlines of an open mouth, seen from the inside, looking out into a world that intermingles the uncanny with the banal. The play with perspective continues here, anchoring us in a state of uncertainty and reinforced by the humorous use of Allison’s repeated motifs. For example, a self-portrait of the artist sitting on the floor opening a clutch purse whilst surrounded by potatoes, sports balls and other round paraphernalia make us wonder from whose perspective we’re witnessing the scene, whose mouth are we perceiving from?

A different story is told when we look to the reverse of these artery paintings. Each one, hung against a freestanding wall, features a smaller painting on the otherside of a cabbage and the smoky silhouette of a side profile. It evokes a mind/body duality as if the larger paintings framed with teeth and gums grounds us in an inescapable physicality just as the underside, the cabbage as a hidden soul or mind, offers refuge away from the grotesque weight and wetness of the body.

Allison Katz, *Artery* at Camden Art Centre, installation view.

The first painting we see, and incidentally the last, if we look back on it when we exit, portrays the ornate body of a cock between teeth and gums covered in grains of rice. Stage Cock coerces us to think about their own bodily existence, where one could so easily be brought to discomfort with rice in our teeth. Or else the rice, used as a drying substance for electronic bodies, dries out this artery and reinvigorates the organic body with function. The use of textures here also emphasises the duality of presence and emptiness, a continuation from Gallery One just as the playful perspective of using the mouth to “see” continues the investigation of what it means to perceive.

Artery is on until 13 March, and includes a related exhibition at Canada House Gallery at the High Commission of Canada in Trafalgar Square, presenting works drawn from the archive of announcement posters that Allison had been creating for her many exhibitions. You can book free tickets to see the show at Camden Art Centre here, and book tickets for the Canada House Gallery here.

Allison Katz - Artery at Camden Art Centre: Review