In her paintings, Jaqueline Cedar uses stylized figuration to explore the awkwardness of human connection. Her compositions see mannered, elongated figures set against sometimes recognizable and other times abstract - but always flat - backdrops of planes of color. With a family connection to filmmaking, Cedar treats her canvases like ad-hoc stages; here, anonymous characters attempt to feel out both their own ambiguous spatial position amongst fields of color, and, more simply, one another. The results can be funny or absurd. They are also, often, intimate. No matter the flatness, or the proximity to full-on abstraction, Cedar’s paintings make one feel as though they have found themselves in similar scenes before, be it an awkward embrace, a long look out a window, or a night on the beach. She has exhibited extensively across the United States.