Bubbles, 2000

Polly Apfelbaum is best known for her "fallen ­paintings," floor-bound arrangements of pieces of cut and dyed fabric. First exhibited in the early 1990s, these works mine sources both high and low, just as they exist in between the genres of painting, sculpture, and craft. Like a great deal of art created after 1960, Apfelbaum’s fallen paintings address the eye, the mind, and the body simultaneously. It is in the nature of these works to set viewers in motion, and upon doing so, we become sensitized to our location in space. Perception, in the case of a work such as Bubbles, is deeply felt, an experience heightened by its psychedelic palette. This particular work is named after one of the Powerpuff Girls, a group of sweet yet formidable cartoon superheroes. The fusion these characters effect between femininity and strength is a fragile one, though, at least from a feminist point of view. As Apfelbaum herself once said, "It was appealing to me that those two characteristics don’t normally go together. There is something just a little perilous about the combination. . . . It’s also about being comfortable with contradiction and different generations of feminism."