Angela Bidak: Still Waters

Light shifts over and infuses through the mist of Niagara Falls—luminous, mutable, transitory, yet ever present. This mist, beside which Angela Bidak was raised, is an undercurrent throughout the exhibition that hides and reveals, invades and evades. In conjunction with the enigmatic quality of the mist across the surface, Bidak’s works contain an impression of weightlessness. As our eye consistently finds precarious horizontal lines across the works, we are left with a sensation of instability. We are suspended without gravity, but not without motion, instead it is as if we are falling and ascending at once. Her palette, primarily a mixture of greens and pinks, opposites combining into obscured violet grey hues, creates an equilibrium of a veil between spheres that is both bruised and blushing.

Within her practice Bidak conceives of her compositions as ‘pre-images’ or ‘pre-forms’ that act as a visual metaphor for the unconscious. Cognition wades below the surface of awareness as the pre-images repeat like a prayer and deteriorate representation back into material, like water eroding a rock. Bidak’s ‘pre-forms’ echo and disintegrate akin to a long exposure photograph where patterns emerge rather than distinct images. Surfaces often begin with frottage and the residue from abrasions create a noisy polluted atmosphere where the clarity of the image blurs. This liminal ground is a mutating one, where image and process concurrently create and destroy one another- confusing our ability to recognise figure from ground.

The paintings’ hazy atmosphere is a disorientated and distorted one, where lost within its confines, we witness a recurring transmutation between geological decay and rebirth. Through a feminist dissection of body and environment, Bidak depicts femme bodies that disintegrate, fracture, resist and emerge as ghost-like forms seeping into the water. These bodies are not obedient, but insurgent ones, undoing the rigidity of the frame. Without its boundary, the figure disappears into the ground, the body dissolves into the landscape. By collapsing boundaries between figure and field, the work interrogates the historical conflation of the feminine body with passive landscape, reconfiguring it as an active site of temporal and material instability.

Concurrently, working with a personal relationship to Catholicism and the western canon’s recurrent preoccupation with the image of the supine Christ figure, Bidak subverts the gender of this motif creating ethereal forms that resist the long patriarchal gaze of history that has coerced the female body in place. Rather, here she sprawls—floating, bathed, baptized. As with other threads throughout Bidak’s practice, the oscillation between contradictions extends to the figure where, although transcending the physical world, the body simultaneously becomes material again, as a loss of anatomy meets loss of autonomy, no longer able to speak, or to defend, and with biting irony has become a true object at last.

Angela Bidak (b. 1991 Niagara Falls, New York) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Bidak graduated from her MFA at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2024 and previously studied at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

Recent exhibitions include: ‘Big Other’, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, 2025; ‘Water, Water, Everywhere’, Black Rock Arts, Buffalo, NY, 2025; ‘Broad Picnic’, Europa, New York, NY, 2024; ‘I Would Not Think to Touch the Sky with Two Arms’, curated by Andrew Dubow, Paulina Caspari, Munich, 2024; Paul Soto Gallery (solo), New York, NY, 2024; ‘Synonyms’, curated by Park McArthur and Jason Hirata, Westbeth Gallery, New York, 2024; ‘Black Lodge’, Island Gallery, New York, NY, 2023.