Take one look and you’ll know you’ve seen this before; for once, that’s not a bad thing in an art exhibition. Roz Chast, the highly recognizable cartoonist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, is about as American as apple pie, pizza, bagels, and those dirty-water hot dogs they sell on the streets of Manhattan. In other words, Chast is American in the way that most of us are: outside the norm — whatever the norm may be — we take what we get and do the best we can with it. Her characters, both human and from every genus in the animal kingdom, mingle our experiences with theirs, and in Chast’s hands those often non-verbalized events are the stuff of wry, hopeful, and downright ridiculous reactions to everyday life in all its unassuming glory. While her work is uniquely and indisputably about New York, the cartoons’ all-too humanness allows for their humor to hit home anywhere in the U.S. Who can’t relate to “Slightly Irregular Books,” for example? “Goldilocks and the Four Bears” — “after a couple of readings, you won’t even notice him”? Priceless.
