Lorna Simpson’s painting retrospective ‘Source Notes’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art starts with an alluringly strange image of a woman and her leashed cheetah swapping faces. Nearby, bullet holes resemble a constellation in the night sky and a huge meteorite hovers in the air in acrylic and screen print works that picture natural phenomenon in unexpected ways. The sense of surprise extends to monumental works that combine female heads taken from mid-century Ebony and Jet magazines with Arctic landscapes that are a deep rich blue color vs the expected white of ice. In this image titled ‘Specific Notation,’ a chic model with a penetrating gaze appears to be semi-buried in or perhaps emerging from a craggy, weathered landscape in a conflation of human and geologic time. (On view through Nov 2nd).
