Karen Kilimnik
b. 1955
Best known for the deconstructed, so-dubbed "Scatter" installations she pioneered in the late 1980s, Karen Kilimnik has more recently alighted on painting-based mise-en-scènes replete with diminutive, loosely rendered canvases and related props. In (2006), a Napoleonic campaign tent furnished with a desk, maps, and a phalanx of toy soldiers is positioned alongside a suite of ThŽodore Géricault-inspired paintings. Like her earlier work, Kilimnik's new projects evidence a lush, quasi-fictive world where august artistic references (e.g., Jean-Baptiste Oudry, George Stubbs, and Sir Henry Raeburn) brush shoulders with contemporary news and cultural icons including Keith Richards, Kate Moss, and Leonardo DiCaprio (especially memorable as Kilimnik's louche Fog machines and minutely chosen decor and furniture likewise abet a through-the-looking-glass experience where, moored in the particularities of specific contexts, nothing is what it seems. As Kilimnik states: "Being so inspired by fairy tales, mysteries, books, TV shows, and ballets, et cetera, I like to make up characters myself as if I'm a playwright." Her mode of appropriation thus involves possession as much as fantasy. Mediati…
Films