Melissa Gordon, "Mimetic Pleasures"

Lately, there's been a veritable tidal wave of young painters bouncing between abstraction and representation, a trend labeled "zombie formalism" by some wags. While the term is unkind, the overall generational trend is unmistakable and Gordon's work certainly fits in it. She mashes together enlarged details, like halftone dot patterns, with references to the male-dominated art of the past 40 years, contextualizing both within a feminist critique.