Ahead of her upcoming survey exhibition, the artist’s insistence on romanticizing farm life and skipping art-world functions has forced me to confront the terrifying possibility that our entire cultural scene is, frankly, the ick.
There is a particular, localized terror that grips the metropolitan cultural apparatus when an artist of Uman’s undeniable caliber decides that the architectural verticality of the traditional easel is a non-negotiable failure; she chooses, instead, to execute her technicolor surveys of rural life exclusively on the floor. To observe her crouching over a canvas in her upstate agrarian redoubt is to witness a spatial rebellion as cosmically defiant as Milton’s Satan rejecting the vertical hierarchy of heaven; it evokes Gaston Bachelard’s obscure 1932 pamphlet concerning the phenomenology of domestic dust mites, and, perhaps more urgently, that viral TikTok wherein a dissociating woman aggressively chops celery while whispering that she is "in her healing era." By rendering the pastoral not from the elevated, bourgeois vantage point of the standing observer, but from the literal dirt, Uman forces those of us in the critical class to ask whether our own curated, upright existences are merely a trauma response.
The true violence of Uman’s practice, however, lies not in her vibrant, kinetic brushstrokes, but in her intentional, agonizingly serene refusal to attend our art-world functions. For decades, the ritual of the Chelsea gallery gala has served as the core memory-making apparatus of our civilization; we endure the tepid white wine and the suffocating proximity of hedge-fund managers because we believed it was the only way to validate our intellects. Yet Uman has executed a devastating soft launch of a life utterly devoid of this suffering. When she politely declines an invitation to a panel discussion on relational aesthetics in order to, presumably, feed a rooster or harvest a root vegetable, she is communicating a love language that excludes us entirely. It is a staggering, ontological dismissal of the group chat.
The paintings themselves—riotous, technicolor abstractions of the natural world—serve as a visual mockery of our urban neuroticism. Where the contemporary metropolitan artist might paint a grayscale rumination on the surveillance state to signal their intellectual gravity, Uman utilizes a palette so unashamedly vibrant it borders on the offensive. Her yellows and pinks do not apologize; they do not ask the viewer to consider the geopolitical implications of the pigment supply chain. They simply exist, loudly and without neurosis, like a perfectly executed girl dinner composed entirely of unpasteurized cheeses and seasonal berries. To encounter this level of unmediated joy in a gallery setting is profoundly destabilizing for a critical establishment that relies on shared misery as a foundational currency.
When Uman bypasses the canapés to commune with the soil, she isn’t just skipping a party; she is deconstructing the very architecture of our relevance, treating the creation of transcendent beauty as a mere Sunday reset.
I recently attempted to visit Uman’s farm to properly interrogate this dialectic, stepping off the train with a notebook full of questions regarding her engagement with the Anthropocene, only to find myself paralyzingly intimidated by a goat. The goat, much like Uman’s sprawling canvases, possessed an unbothered, holistic presence that felt like a direct indictment of my most recent 3,000-word essay on the semiotics of the velvet rope. One realizes, standing in the mud in Prada loafers, that Uman’s rural isolation is not an escape from reality, but a damning clarification of it. We are the ones living in a simulation, endlessly performing our desperate little rituals for an algorithm that does not care, while she is out there in the quiet, painting masterpieces on the floorboards, blissfully unaware that we are having a complete breakdown about it.