Barred From the Studio references three separate pieces of Thomas Eakins’s life and makes a funny little mirror out of them.

Not an actual mirror, but Dotty Attie takes the shocking bits of his most famous painting, The Gross Clinic (did Victorians do puns?), text regarding the incident that got him fired from the Pennsylvania Academy, and a funny little double-take portrait of one of his homies rowing.

Attie is a sampling master, taking tiny bits (6” x 6” pictures and 3” x 4” text, every time) of things and making them into something completely different. Here she takes what art nerds call an important American painting and turns it into a joke at the expense of the 19th century prudes who were outraged that Eakins allowed female students to draw actual penises from real life. Max Schmitt (the guy rowing) is like, seriously dawgs, chill.

Attie and Eakins are similar figures. He was one of the first artists to incorporate photography into his practice and his love of the nude figure was probably encouraged by over-the-top reactions from puritanical Philadelphia parents. As soon as Attie was out of art school she returned to her taboo love of copying pictures.  Her first husband didn’t really like her provocative, biting work, which is so different from her mild-mannered presence. Not that she cared what he thought about her art: A.I.R. Gallery and the 19 other badass ladies are the work fam,husbands are for home life, and home life only.

Eakins work was criticized in its day as being melodramatic, which coincidentally is Dotty Attie’s favorite background noise; she never works without a soap opera playing on the TV. But this piece is more interested in observing melodrama than creating it. Age of Reason? Yeah riiiiiiight, Victorians were dramatic AF. They made a huge fuss anytime somebody got naked in public or tried to elicit any kind of emotion at all. Attie is throwing heavy shade on the hypocrisy and, without forcing intentions into her work, maybe saying that we haven’t outgrown many of those knee-jerk Puritan tantrums?