NADA New York 2024

For Latislaw, responding to the 1913 children’s book, “Pollyanna,” the directive to embrace all situations with a smile propels his cast of characters into a bacchanal of delusion, irrepressible innocence, insistent suppression and exuberant absurdity.

Laboriously transforming needle felted wool into richly animated sculptures, Latislaw presents us with the denizens of this mind-game: a drunken ‘come-hither’ horse with twisting legs; a bear, a goose, and a rabbit dragging a captive chicken caught in a dramatic bar fight. For Latislaw, each figure informs the following one in a slow process of “neurotic story-building.” The concrete details of the narrative are not as important to the artist, however, as the formal and creative possibilities each part of the sequence affords—each arrangement allowing for new associations and imagining.