The work Tightrope (1994), a late masterpiece of Amos’ oeuvre, presents an almost life-size portrait of the artist balancing precariously on a tightrope above a crowd of blurred faces and a net of glaring, disembodied eyes. Wearing a Wonder Woman costume and a painter’s smock, Amos steadies herself with paintbrushes in one hand, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a nude torso in the other. The T-shirt bears a detail of Paul Gauguin’s 1899 portrayal of his teenage Tahitian mistress Teha’amana from the painting Two Tahitian Women. Here, Amos borrows a figure from the work of a celebrated European master to disembody it and render it strange. Tightrope looks to Gauguin as an artist who frequently viewed women of color not as individuals with their own subjectivities, but as objects of representation and sexual desire. However, Amos’s appropriation of Gauguin is not simply an indictment of the colonial gaze and the chauvinism of “great” white male artists, but a complex positioning of self vis-à-vis the problematic history of European art.
