Artist Project / Untitled

The characters depicted in Amy Cutler’s meticulous drawings inhabit a world where internal emotional states are physicalized—where anxieties and obsessions are expressed in uncanny physiological mutations, improbable costumes, austerely mysterious settings, and often indecipherable individual and communal behaviors. The flat, affectless expressions worn by Cutler’s women (and they are almost exclusively women) are strategically inscrutable: they can be read to suggest either a disregard for the gaze of those who view their compulsive ritual activities or a pervasive sense of shame related to this exposure, a shame whose effect has deadened their countenances as it has eroded their spirits.