Art Papers Magazine / The Political Body

Art Papers Magazine; Sept./Oct. 2001 issue 

"REVIEWS Southeast:  The Political Body",  by Dorothy Joiner

Traditionally depicted as desirable or less often as repugnant--think of Quinten Massey's Grotesque Old Women in London's Natinal Gallery, for example--the female body in art until the last few decades has been largely an object to be looked at by others.  Contemporary art, however, has turned this legacy on its head. "The Political Body" (Blumilk Paradigm Art Space, Apr. 14-May 4), an exhibition of works by 14 Atlanta women, offered an arresting sampling of this inversion.  No longer an object for delectation or derision by others, the female body is for these artists a bearer of their own fantasies, speculations, and anxieties, with more than a touch of mordant wit.

Each of Sharon Shapiro's "split canvases" is made up of two paintings hung together horizontally as one.  Against a burgundy ground, the aging, angst-ridden face of Nurse is joined to a flat-chested, pre-adolescent body dressed in drab blue.  Juxtaposed to the chest are, in the lower canvas, the skirt, legs, and feet of a child, neither sanding firmly--one foot pointed toward the viewer, the other angled into depth.  An inky shadow behind the girl blots the raised, peach-hued ground.  A conflatin of mature apprehension and child-like awkwardness, Nurse projects a haunting psychic mood.  Slip, Shapiro's portait of Sheree North, inspired of an early '50s cover of Life, shows the would-be Marilyn Monroe in a cheesecake pose, half danceer, half skater.  Red lips parted, eyes bright, yellowed hair wig-like perfect, Sheree embodies the too-eager yearning for fame and acceptance of a starlet who didn't quite make it, the emblem of ny driving need for approval. 

With good-natured humor, Kathy Yancey makes visible the maternal aspect of the feminine in a diminutive figure whose top is a Victorian ceramic doll and whose skirt is a modern min cushion remade after the original.  Hera, Goddess of Childbirth, All Things Domestic and Spite is decked with scores of miniature squirming babies.  Skewered with minacious, pearl-tipped pins and needles looped with red thread that wraps around her head and neck, Hera is the "Great Mother," pierded and crucified, oozing crimson "blood."  Wife of the philandering Zeus, Hera suffers, her pain converted into malice towards her husband and his concubines.

Corinne Adams manipulates photographs--cutting, tearing, and layering figures to give expression to the psychological processis involved in self-actualization through a study of her own dreams.  She compares this sometime painful endeavor to peeling away the outer skins of an onion.  In Shadow Series 14, for instance, Adams covers the woman's face with that of another, the edges of the paper torn, the facial features at a divergent angle.  

In a small oval paintings derived from an earlier sculptural series of "anti-Barbies," Lilly Cannon focuses on those elements of a woman's life antithetical to Barbie's sterile, plastic perfection.  The pre-pubescent doll of Breeder wears a somewhat cynical rabbit's head with spiky little breasts, ovaries and a uterus painted in pink on the body--a ludic view of procreation.  In Life Cycle, the same doll's body is permeated by a root system that emerges from the feet and sprouts flowers from the head--at once an allusion to Frida Kahlo's famous image and a vivid metaphor of nature's "diurnal course."  With a target painted on its chest, the doll of Thoughts Like Birds holds a tiny pistol (a prize accomanying bubble gum).  The "bird-thoughts" flying out of its head are shot down before they develop.  Black plastic flowers and foliage surround the doll of What Is Mine Is Yours, a dark, lacy fern obscuring the childish pudendum.  Its eyes enhanced by the actual lashes, this Eve figure seems to emerge from the "heart of darkness."

In a large painting of one of her signature ladies a la Venus de Milo, Lisa Shinault's lyrical fantasy, Lady Level, sits on a yellow hassock, her upper arms replaced by the extended poles.  Forearms and hands at the end of the 'extensions' grasp the flowing white garment, which unfurls gracefully to the ground.  A golden halo surrounds her angelic countenance, and pink roses round out her image as coy and sweet.  Undercutting this suavity, nonetheless, is the fact that those outstretched poles would knock onlookers over.  Hardly a lady-like gesture!  And and ungainly duck waddles nearby--a latter -day incarnation of Leda's swan?

Expertly curated by Jennifer Vanderpool, the exhibition reminds the viewer that few aspects of life are as charged with personal meaning as the body.