Cats and Girls

Caroline Wong’s pastels of females and felines feasting together force a duality, eliciting a mixture of joy and revulsion, provoking pleasure with disgust. While nauseating, while dizzying, they are cathartic too, life-affirming. Her women: drunken, disheveled, shouting, on the verge of vomiting, spilling sauces, regurgitating soda, bent over the table, splayed out on the bed, kneeling on the floor, slurping, licking, chewing, consuming. We see how warped and uneasy women’s relationship to food is.

Wong takes up space, fills space and makes space, at a large scale. Themes around femininity, queerness, desire, and the right to female pleasure, pervade her pieces. Saturating each canvas, Wong’s mission is to fill that void, to feel no guilt or shame for taking what one needs and wants. But there is that anxiety too, the need to identify what one needs and wants, and the fear that this process of identification will be harder to achieve than one hoped. By taking control of their bodies and diets themselves, Wong’s women still feel out of control. The works signal a release, but with this release, comes also, a panic.

Amelia Wilson

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