With evocative paintings such as Prism and Lens, Zoe Walsh (b. 1989) skillfully forges a space within contemporary art that is distinctly reflective of the artist’s concerns on digital mediation and gender fluidity. The present painting from The Robledo-Palop Collection is titled in homage to the profound literary works of Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker, and it bridges the analog and the digital, forming a narrative as complex and layered as the identities they explore. In doing so, Zoe Walsh offers a commentary on the evolving nature of contemporary art itself—malleable, transient, and deeply personal. Walsh’s incorporation of screenprint, a technique traditionally associated with serial reproduction, is anything but conventional. Instead, they employ this medium to fragment and reassemble source materials into new forms, echoing the non-binary fluidity of their own identity in the metamorphosis of image to art.

Through Prism and Lens, Walsh dissects and reconstructs the photographic past, specifically sourcing from late 70s gay pornographic imagery produced by Falcon Studios. They harness digital tools to shatter the original context, creating a virtual stage where history is both preserved and transformed. The screen-printed layers serve as a foundation over which translucent gels and acrylic paints are applied, capturing and bending light in a filmic homage. This interplay of opacity and translucence mirrors the voyeuristic glimpses in Hacker’s poem, where “dull gold in dim rooms” and “figures pause and pass” become a dance of visibility and concealment, reflecting the clandestine encounters from afar. For Walsh, the painting becomes a prism itself, refracting the diverse spectrums of human experience and identity, and crystallizing them into a singular, transformative tableau.

The artwork is a visual feast of intersecting planes and vibrant hues, where light is both a literal and metaphorical agent of revelation. “The lamps along the river, one by one,” as described by Hacker, find their analog in the luminescent dots and strokes that pierce the painting’s surface, akin to the sun’s spears taming the dark. In this ethereal landscape, Walsh challenges the traditional confines of linear perspective, allowing pattern and color to dictate the movement within the space. The reflective motif, so deftly woven through the piece, offers a shifting, almost aquatic dynamism, where viewers find themselves submerged in a world that is at once a memory and a reverie. In Prism and Lens, Walsh materializes the intangible—inviting contemplation, interaction, and ultimately, transformation, echoing their belief in identification as a potent catalyst for change. This painting stands not only as a work of art but as a poetic vessel for the multifaceted explorations of self and the ceaseless flow of life’s continuous becoming.