"St. Vincent grants her organisms autonomy within the amorphous terrain circumscribed by the dyads they spawn: endearing and gross, inside and out, gendered and not, evil and pure, humorous and serious, rococo and classical. There is a politics to making art that depicts non-sentient beings with self-sufficiency; even more obviously so in substituting snail-infested grapes for ovaries (as in Cleopatra’s Ovaries) in the same year the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. Yet it isn’t at all clear that those snails are a menace, which suggests the more significant and more subtle principle upon which St. Vincent’s works turn: they derive potency from operating on that razor thin edge where generalized suggestions become specific and therefore personal to each viewer. This is both the anthropologist’s task of making the strange familiar and a prime lesson of abstraction, which St. Vincent adopts profitably within the language of representation."
