Creators and Destroyers: The Many Guises of Eve
Artists have mused over the female form as far back as recorded history takes us. Goddesses, warriors, saints and a cast-out from the Garden of Eden, women in art are numerous and varied. These many guises of Eve are on display in the group exhibitions at both Phyllis Weston-Annie Bolling Gallery and Manifest Gallery.
David Miretsky's pencil loves the female body. Three graphite drawings by Miretsky are included in the exhibit 'Inspiring Collectors: Various Art by Six Cincinnati Artists' at the Phyllis Weston Annie Bolling Gallery. The show boasts Frank McElwain, who is the only living artist with work in the Proctor & Gamble collection. There are also etchings created by Harry Shokler during the WPA projects of the 1930's. These works concern landscapes and skillful renderings of Cincinnati's historical sites. With regards to the female landscape, however, it is David Miretsky's territory.
Born in Kiev, Russia in 1939 Miretsky now lives in the United States but revisits the people of his homeland in his paintings. They are often beautiful women. Some look like Hollywood actresses of the 1940's, others are large and voluptuous. Miretsky paints huge rounded bodies, delicate features, and tiny hands and feet. The connection to Fernando Botero is an easy one to make, but Annie Bolling says the artist doesn't see this comparison. Perhaps, Miretsky's women are more like goddesses. Like the Hindu goddess Kali, the creator and destroyer, they devour the universe with their tiny red lips.
Miretsky's paintings displayed at Weston - Bolling in 2007. These three pencil drawings, now on display, look like preliminary sketches for his paintings. There is a lack of connection between the delicate facial features and the sharply outlined body in Portrait of a Woman 1. A simple outline delineates the neck and shoulders from the background, whereas Miretsky seems to have taken more time to render the darks and highlights of hair. The dress is textured with cross-hatching, which makes the evening gown look coarse. By contrast, her face is smooth as porcelain, where the artist has left the white paper untouched. Miretsky's Lady in a Fox Fur is more congruent. The facial features are exaggerated, and fit well with the primitive hands and the gaudy clothes. This is the strongest of the three pieces, appropriately centered on the wall, between the other two. It is the Lady in a Fox Fur that you look at and say 'Now, that's a Miretsky.'
Where Miretsky places a premium on feminine beauty, Michael Scheurer deconstructs the shapes of womanhood. His series of mixed media works at Weston-Bolling are beauty in their most bizarre and abstracted forms. Scheurer has a long history of collecting antiques, stalking the second hand shops and dumpster diving. Each collage is a shrine to decades of collecting. The center of attention in Lamplighter (Surreal Series #5), 2008 is a woman's face with a 'wicked witch' green complexion. It looks as if the artist harvested the hair from a fashion magazine, and grafted it, like a wig, to the green head. If Miretsky's women have dainty features, than Scheurer women are nothing but features. They have huge, vacant eyes; lips with an attitude; bulbous cheeks; and tennis ball breasts. The artist is fine-tuning his depictions of women in a new 'Girl Series.'
Scheurer has cut out her eyes, now gaping, almond-shaped holes, filled in with cryptic writing. There is something tragic in the expression of this woman without eyes. Daring to take a psychoanalytic approach; she is the tragic hero of Greek drama, the Oedipus Rex or the Electra. She gouges out her eyes, blinding herself from her own latent sexual impulses toward her father or perhaps her mother.
The presence of Greek mythology is more prevalent in the exhibition at Manifest Gallery. For 'Mythography: An Exploration of Narrative,' curator Tim Parsley selected works based on the power of story telling. Three themes emerged as he put together the show. Many of the works touch on history, but a manipulated and distorted sense of history. Others tell a more linear narrative and take the viewer on a journey. Then there is the Eve series, as Parsley calls it, works that are concerned with women and femininity.
Eve does not embody one idyllic human form, but her many guises are depicted by the artists of 'Mythography'. In Robert McCann's Specimen three women and two men converse awkwardly in their underwear. They hold jars of yellow 'specimen' with the same disregard that they would give to wearing a name tag on their shirt. The three women don't exactly stand as gracefully as Grecian statues, nor are they as thin as super-models. What they are is captivating. Compositionally the five figures are positioned in a triangular formation. The woman in the center of this orgy of bodies is herself glowing yellow. Her skin is actually the color of the specimens in the jars. They are all, in fact, strange specimens, each one of these half naked bodies, but no stranger than any of the rest of us.
Jessica Grace Bechtel's Ripening, 2007 could be interpreted as Eve's coming of age. The elongated pink body stretches against a tropical backdrop. Her back is to the viewer and because she lacks many feminine curves, I can't definitively say she is a woman. She could just as easily be an adolescent boy. The fingers are slender but strong. Do we always have a need to define gender? Here I am not sure it is so important, and if I did not know this painting was part of the Eve series I probably would not have given it any thought.
On one side of the wooden canvas is a baby, evoking that image of fertility, but then who is to say it is not virility? Youthful innocence and purity is another way of looking at this ethereal, floating infant. A phallic looking symbol is also present in a hanging bushel of bananas. The painting seems more concerned with exuding sensuality than defining gender. Looking at the supple green leave and the fertile forest, this painting appears to be a coming of age tale.
Charles Caldemeyer's Creators and Destroyers, 2005 tells the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, but in the building of society and its inevitable collapse there are vignettes of mythology. In one such mythological tale, Caldemeyer recreates Leonardo Da Vinci's Leda and the Swan, (1515-1520). Caldemeyer depicts a miniature Leda, whose S-curve pose is true to the original Renaissance painting. The god Jupiter, disguised as a swan, snakes his long neck up to Leda's body in an effort to seduce his lover.
Caldemeyer also re-imagines Jupiter and Io (c. 1531) as depicted by Antonio da Correggio. Jupiter, now assumes the veil of a billowy gray cloud, delivering tender kisses to Io's lips. What purpose do these mythologies serve in Caldemeyer's work? Why has he chosen these particular Renaissance paintings to copy as he constructs his Tower of Babel? The western civilizations in Caldemeyer's painting are built on violent conquests. The conqueror triumphs by rape and pillage. Is this the message behind the mythology? Are Leda, Io and all women the causalities of war and conquest?
Not necessarily. Caldemeyer also re-imagined the allegory of Judith and Holofernes. In the center of his painting, is Judith, viciously cutting off the head of Holofernes. As a woman, Judith embodies the power of the Israelis to defeat their enemy. Michelangelo Caravaggio's depiction of this allegory is a well known Baroque example, but Caldemeyer has instead chosen to re-create a painting by Artemesia Gentileschi. This heightens the meaning of the tale, considering that Gentileschi's depiction of the murder is far bloodier and more realistic than her male predecessors. Gentileschi was raped and her father took the accused, Agostino Tassi, to court. Adding insult to injury, court documents indicate that Tassi claimed he had not raped Gentileschi, rather, she was such a poor artist, that he was merely schooling her on perspective. Gentileschi painted Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1612-1613 during the trial. She became obsessed with the allegorical tale, painting it several more times. In re-creating Gentileschi's painting, Caldemeyer explores the power women have to write their own history, and as the title suggests, women are both creators and destroyers of that history.
The female form is a celebratory subject in art. Think back to the fertility-goddesses of prehistoric societies. The 25,000 year-old Venus of Willendorf being one of the best surviving examples. Beyond a bearer of children, women in art are objects of desire, power and wrath. She is the Virgin, and the prostitute simultaneously, as in James Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, has a love-hate relationship with women; it is his 'Virgin Mary Prostitute' complex. The woman in art is Venus, she is Mary, she is Kali, she is Eve, and she is every woman.
MYTHOGRAPHY: An Exploration of Narrative, curated by Tim Parsley, March 6-April 3, 2009, Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center, 2727 Woodburn Avenue, Cincinnati
Inspiring Collectors: Works on Paper, Mixed Media Pieces, and WPA Serigraphs under $4,000, Feb 6-March 28, 2009, Phyllis Weston-Annie Bolling Gallery, 2003 Madison Road, Cincinnati
