Deflector

At a subsequent show I had at Castelli, Feigen, Corcoran in November 1982, I developed some of the themes I had begun to deal with in House of Fire: the contrast of organic elements with industrial objects. In 1982, in While the Earth Revolves at Night, I used the image of groceries falling out of a bag again; this time they are in free fall. In the center of the painting is a huge finger with a lacquered nail doubling as a pen nib, suspended at a window behind a venetian blind. The fingernail shaped into a pen point was dedicated to women authors who write and read at night while star movement and nighttime and machinery rolls on. It's about the quiet at night when people write. Her pen is inscribing star trails. I showed two other large horizontal paintings — Reflector, which featured foil-covered ham resting on a ball bearing, while in a separate compartment to the right I painted a tree trunk turning into a drainpipe; and Deflector, where the ham has turned into a mysterious shape wrapped in transparent pink plastic. I also showed some drawings done on frosted Mylar.
I even got a good review in The New York Times. "They may look like the posterish Rosenquists of yore, with their collagelike juxtaposition[s]," Vivien Raynor wrote, "alternately playful and calculated. But, in fact, the artist is far more ferocious and willful than before... No one can accuse Mr. Rosenquist — always the most violent and least penetrable of the Pop artists — of mellowing." That made me feel happy; someone in the art world was finally getting me again. (J. Rosenquist in Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, New York, 2009, p. 273.)