Though devoid of human figures, Awad's "Gate Paintings" recall the very gendered and gentrified spaces of 19th-century works like Goya's Majas on a Balcony, 1800-10, or Manet's The Balcony, 1869. Familiar metal-gate patterns trace through haphazard fields of abstract color. Nominating these decorative elements as worthy sites of inquiry, the paintings play the game of figures/ground and characterize the surface of the canvas as a liminal screen. These might be the peripheries of any private property, from the modest to the palatial, and we could be in just as easily as out. -Grant Johnson, pg. 109