William J. Simmons reviews the exhibition Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 at at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, on view through July 14, 2013.

Simmons writes: "Eisenman uses her penchant for subversion to at once undo and reify the importance of the visual arts in posing those unanswerable questions that must be considered in an era marked by forgetting and erasure. As Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis Matrix Curator Apsara DiQuinzio points out in her evocative text to accompany the exhibition, the pieces included all “coalesce around the theme of social and economic hardship,” specifically with regard to the inability of capitalism to maintain any sort of equity on either economic or psychic levels. It is a problem that artists have wrestled with for centuries – how can one depict injustice when painting, printing, and sculpting are inscribed in the very regime of commoditization that has left us scarred by poverty, fear, and disillusionment?"