Still, Then Moving
Blah Blah Art Gallery
907 Christian St.
Philadelphia
Seen Jun 26, 2025
Showing June 6 - July 6
In “Look,” by artist Jacqueline Cedar, we see the smokey swirls of Earth’s expansive terrain from an aerial view — framed by the dull, restrictive lens of an airplane porthole.
It’s one of several claustrophobic yet immersive 10x8’’ or smaller acrylic scenes crafted by Cedar and included in BlahBlah Art Gallery’s show, “Still, Then Moving.” The three-person exhibit features work by Cedar as well as Meghan Cox and Sarah Pater, all of whom use paint to playfully prod at the surreal borders of how we perceive the passage of time.
Whereas Cox utilizes a trompe-l’oeil approach and Pater a flattened, hyperrealistic one, Cedar approaches the theme of stillness through a mushier, cartoonesque style.
Sample artworks by Pater and Cox.
Cox and Pater use uncanny artistic techniques to stew a sense of discomfort among onlookers; Cedar manufactures that same unease through situational, sensorial accessibility. “Look,” for example, juxtaposes the serene beauty of Earth seen from above with the dull charge of sterile plane air. An in-motion planet appears as peachy static when you’re 30,000 feet in the sky — but the viewer can only catch a glimpse, because that swirling outlook on life is limited by the pinched windows of a darkly ambient aircraft. The far-off, silent spin of our planet is exclusively witnessed at shaky altitudes with clogged and pounding ears.
Cedar sustains this cramped feeling through her miniature paintings of tessellating subjects, like “Lay,” which depicts a stack of gray seals leaning into one another’s bodies like fat droplets of ocean water joining forces; or “More,” which shows a curved hand hovering over an endless wall of purple puzzle pieces. “Talk” illustrates the naked bottom half of a woman with knee crossed over thigh in bed, maybe chatting on the phone while her pink skin blends into the raspberry striped wallpaper.
More images by the artist: "Ex Machina," "Talk," and "Wake."
In all of these paintings, rugged brushstrokes forge synonymy between subject and background, delineating the conscious awareness of outsider perspective from the pulsing cohesion of each present moment cemented onto Cedar’s panels.
The slight size of these works forces us to lean into every image, to narrow our focus until we feel that we are within the painting. They function like cells of emotion; every artwork is a still life shrouded in some kind of action or thought. There is a sense of resigned vitality streaming out of Cedar's interest in overlapping entities.
Cedar hits on the eery awareness of that time is a limited resource. Many of her scenes are implicitly lazy, showcasing individuals stuck in place: seals stuck in piles of their own blubber, a person stuck in bed, someone stuck on a puzzle they can't solve. But the knowledge that time still moves within and around these freeze-framed images is in the details; it's in the illusion of moving water surrounding Cedar's seals, in the bidirectional brushstrokes that bleed chaos into bloated puzzle pieces and uneven striped wallpaper, and it's in the dialogue between a speeding jet and a spinning earth.
Whether dissociated into a puzzle or adrift in the stratosphere, Cedar’s buzzy gaze is a reminder that we are all passengers of time and motion. We can't stop time, but if we slow down enough, we can look it in the eye.
