Looky-Looky,
1994
Etching on chine colle, 10/25

Lent anonymously

Gladys Nilsson, like her husband Jim Nutt, is part of the Hairy Who school of Chicago artists, a group exuberantly notorious for endlessly polymorphous-perverse satire and a sense of visual humor that is several steps beyond the fringe. They do, however, possess great graphic skill and psychological acuity. Nilsson, like Christine de Pizan, confronts the image of her own womanhood. But she has replaced Pizan's sacred anguish with good-natured mockery of both stereotypes and anti-stereotypes. She seems to bless the tangle of our own attempt to imagine ourselves. She delights in the fact that self-knowledge is a mess. . .a lovely mess. The second looky in the title should be printed in reverse.