OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art)

Los Angeles–based artist Amy Adler works across the disciplines of drawing, performance, photography, and film. For nearly three decades she has blended narrative fiction, appropriated imagery, and personal history to generate images that occupy the tension between what we are given visual access to and what is withheld.

 

Nice Girl presents a new body of oil pastel works that investigate the ubiquitous social media mirror selfie, reflecting how people both see themselves and share outward their own reflections. Across the 20 canvases that comprise the show’s installation, a series of anonymous young women meet our eye, each having made the choice to share their likeness online with the public. Raising questions of identity, femininity, youth, imagination, and performativity, Adler’s process is intimate, laborious, and physically demanding, requiring time not generally reserved for our contemporary mode of image viewing. Nice Girl demands a slowing down, asking us, as viewers, to examine the power dynamics inherent in the creation of an image and to reflect on our own assumptions about what makes someone a “nice girl.”

 

Adler’s work offers a poignant reminder of what it feels like to search for who you are—trying on identities, assessing your self-worth through the eyes of others, and ultimately experiencing what it’s like to be observed: by friends, family, strangers, and, ultimately, oneself.

 

Amy Adler: Nice Girl is organized by Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and Director, with support from the entire OCMA staff.

 

Supporting sponsorship of Nice Girl is provided by Barbara and Tad Danz.

Sponsorship is provided by Linda Poole Maggard.