Townsville

A whorl of riotous color, "Townsville" is composed of hand-dyed pieces of velvet arranged on the floor. “I didn’t want art on a pedestal. I wanted it on the floor,” Polly Apfelbaum explains. “Sculpture sits on the floor, but I wondered what it would mean to have a painting on the floor. It was a support that I thought had been ignored. And it can be an interesting place—a place that belongs to domesticity, the place where your dirty clothes go.” In this exuberant work, which the artist calls a “fallen painting,” the artist combines traditions high and low. By working on the floor and staining fabric, she responds to and subverts poured and stained paintings made by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis. She also zealously embraces popular culture: "Townsville" is named after the city where the animated cartoon characters, The Powerpuff Girls, lived. Apfelbaum has produced several works inspired by the popular female superheroes who were famous for trying to rid the world of evil before bedtime.