“The inferno of the living is not one that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Where we live determines how we live: it is a simple principle that has surreal effects. In Liz Craft and Zoe Barcza’s work, warped faces and flattened children occupy an absurd, kaleidoscopic cityscape. The built environment and its subjects entwine to form conjoined beings, ones that are grotesque, mysterious, and confrontational. Both Barcza and Craft revel in playful contradictions, exposing the dark humor of contemporary urban life. In City People, inhabitants of an unknown city enact poses—a woman juts out her hip, a young boy sits cross-legged. These gestures unfold across flat sheets of aluminum traced to form the shapes of bodies, each bearing the imprints of forms and textures sourced from on-site casts of a city’s surface made by Craft herself. A latent circular drain emerges, a silhouette and a manhole convene, outlines of bricks and asphalt layer the bodies. The figures are physically shaped by the topographies they occupy, enacting prescribed expressions of affect while displaying surfaces that show the actual markings of a city’s foundation. In Barcza’s newest work, the face of a woman appears under harsh neon lighting, her image contorted over bulbous bodily protrusions. Airbrushed images conjure the sleek visual lexicon of advertising or film. These uncanny visions collage across fragmented views of modified sexual anatomy—a pierced nipple, a bare vagina—the contours of which morph each face into cartoonish caricature. As in Craft’s displays of public performance, Barcza’s layered compositions explore physically altered bodies as both modes of self-expression and byproducts of the built environment. Her paintings reproduce and critique the demonstrations of power present in the city at large. Inspired by comics and graphic novels, Craft and Barcza utilize language and visual modes that play with the artifice of the genre. Barcza’s faces offer musings, via speech bubbles, that parody the voice of the artist herself. Her selfexpressions dialogue with Craft’s negotiations of silence and flatness. Barcza’s warped neon phrases look explosive next to Craft’s reserved, slyly comedic depictions of urban dwellers. Jointly, they examine the way cities and their inhabitants mutually direct, control, and distort each other. These explorations of hybridity and caricature, of inner monologue and external performance, combine to form an inextricable whole. - Claudia Ross