COVID-19
Looking uncannily like a heroine risen right off the pages of a mythology book, Monika Plioplyte stands nude in a wheat field, on a sand dune, surrounded by prairie grasses, her body draped in paper latticework based on traditional Lithuanian designs. Half-submerged in a pond, she’s surrounded by water that repeats her garment’s motif. (Nature is full of patterns.) The artist weaves and collages these textiles, which also come in the form of wall-hung tapestries, from hundreds of tiny female bodies, risograph-printed cut-outs of poses that mimic the ancient pagan goddesses of Eastern Europe. Colored in sepia, black and red, the images’ solarization imbues a vision of glowing female power emanating not from a single but an intertwined mass of women. Though in actuality they are all based on the printmaker’s own figure, in spirit they recall Ana Mendieta and all the other female land artists of times past and present, a sisterhood to which Plioplyte undoubtedly belongs.
—Lori Waxman 2020-11-09 1:04 PM