New York City, January 1,1998
Vincent Carducci discusses Judy Rifka's exhibition of her "Pet Boy" series at Alley Culture:
The "Pet Boy" motif, a cartoonish cat-headed male figure often rendered seminaked, made its first appearance in Rifka's work in the late 1970s. At that time, she adopted a feminist position which led her to appropriate techniques of the male gaze as an art strategy. Here the "Pet Boy" installation comprised dozens of outlined figures in several standardized poses, each mechanically reproduced on 5-by-S-inch card stock, arranged on the wall in floor-to-ceiling rows. The figures were hand-painted in a rainbow of flesh tones as a multicultural array of exotic yet commodified objects of desire. A Neo-Classical pattern on the banding of the underwear worn by many of the "Pet Boys" looks to have been derived from a Gianni Versace ad.
The entire article can be found here.
