This scene is based on something more violent (witnessed by ‘shorthand’ clues like police clubs, shields, appendages being tugged and so on), and I think we feel the affect, this strength the artists are trying to layer into the work, alongside the more technical, formal flourishes (which themselves are deeply conceptual.)

For instance, the green blur here is an example of the anti-gravitational paint I mentioned earlier. Here it abuts a painterly gesture of what might be a brushstroke. But these are very ambiguous, and we can’t really decipher the painterly mark. In fact we realize that they have problematized the entire act of deciphering. We know these images, for the most part, and yet they make us scrutinize them, troubling the image so that we ourselves are troubled in their interpretation. The artists confront us with the obstacles of actually reading the image, and at the same time plunge us into it.

There is a sly self-consciousness about the notion of framing, as the corner of the shield is echoed almost in the frames that define a filmic action, or the frames of photography. The foreground and the background are disrupted.

As I mentioned earlier, the artists often take a picture of what is painted—what is on the surface of the painting—and introduce this picture back into the representation itself. So this collaged element amplifies the self-referentiality of the work, as if it is endlessly referring back into its own making.

The figure here is also endowed with power: there is a kind of speed, of resolve, in spite of the attempts to retain her. She is elevated to some mythic stance, and yet remains immediate and wrapped up in urgency. She is like a non-human fantasy of a contemporary human.