How We Would Talk

How We Would Talk, by the American painter Schutz, belongs to a series first exhibited in 2007 under the title “Stand By Earth Man,” in which she pictures alternative ways—past or future—of performing such human activities as talking, dancing and giving birth. These speculative fictions are part of Schutz’s ongoing exploration of the narrative possibilities of painting and of her own self-reflexivity. In How We Would Talk, the layer of dirt on the phone booth window through which the woman draws her hand is actually composed of spatters of the paint that forms her. And what the traces of her fingers reveal is another painting, resembling a Van Gogh landscape.