Select Reviews of Lois Polansky’s Work
“Lois Polansky’s Caidoz/Zodiac, is a personal meditation on the astrological system. Using newspaper clippings to represent events in time, the artist has created a fascinating amalgam of past and future that simultaneously looks back and ahead.”
— Helen Harrison, New York Times, March 28, 1999
“Lois Polansky uses a modified Tarot deck to deal hands that decide the fate of whole populations. Her collages incorporate references to wars, famines and other induced catastrophes, assigning responsibility to a combination of human folly and global cause and effect. Ms. Polansky’s Game of Leopard pictures that phenomenon as a molecular chain of events in which no conflict is isolated or independent. The leopard is the symbolic predator, but each aggressor is also a potential victim. The molecular structure at the work’s heart also suggests atomic power. The outcome depends on how humankind chooses to play the ultimate endgame.
— Helen Harrison, New York Times, January 7, 1996
“In House of Cards, [Polansky] has reinterpreted the ancient Tarot deck with reference to both the solidity of traditional architecture and the intangibility of intellectual constructs”
— Helen Harrison, New York Times, December 10, 1995
“Perhaps the overriding constant in the works on view is the artist’s concern with transformation. Simulation and theatricality ensure that nothing is quite what it seems to be, thereby forcing alternative interpretations to outweigh superficial appearances.
— Helen Harrison, New York Times, August 25, 1991
