Julia Wachtel on Pandemic Screen Culture

Portrait of Julia Wachtel in her Connecticut studio, 2020.
Painter Julia Wachtel has spent the last four decades appropriating advertising and popular culture imagery. Wachtel’s compositions tend to highlight wry juxtapositions of visual information: for example, a cartoon mushroom bifurcating a warehouse fully stocked with consumer goods in SuperMushroom (2020). With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist began making short videos (all 2020). Culled mainly from television shows an