In four larger-than-life unstretched canvases and five miniature works, California-born, Edmonton-based painter Preston Pavlis introduces a cast of \u201cinverted self-figurations,\u201d from a bride to a football player. The title for his first solo exhibition\u200a\u2014\u200aStill ready to curse and rage\u200a<\/em>\u2014\u200aborrows a line from Jay Wright\u2019s poem \u201cThe Albuquerque Graveyard\u201d (1976), in which Wright searches for his identity among past generations of African Americans at their graves. Inspired by this introspective methodology, Pavlis plays out internal conflicts through his alter egos. But, like the unsatisfied Wright, who drops flowers at his relatives\u2019 gravesides in defeat, Pavlis offers no resolution. The power lies instead in an unresolved tension, in which Pavlis\u2019s characters reveal themselves in vulnerable moments of self-reflection while resisting full legibility. With simmering energy that isn\u2019t quite rage, body language, equivocal in what it communicates, shrouds the characters\u2019 inner thoughts. This phenomenon appears in Inner life<\/em> (2021), wherein a seated man, topless and in spiritual contemplation, emerges from a dark ground of hollyhocks. As a voyeur intruding on the garden scene, one wonders, are the arms propped behind his head portraying assertive dominance or diffident self-cradling? The pose is reproduced on a flower-petal bed in Second sight <\/em>(2021)\u200a\u2014\u200aalbeit shrunk, rotated, and cropped at the waist. Torsos and faces spanning the smaller paintings elude the viewer\u2019s control through their fragmentation. By keeping their distance, Pavlis\u2019s glassy-eyed characters gain agency.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n