Visual Art: Vis-A-Visage intern curated exhibit at Object+Thought

Vis-A-Visage, a group exhibit now on-view at Object+Thought, focuses on the question of the feminine, specifically the female face as it relates to beauty, pop-culture and history, but successfully avoids all the bad metaphors that can disempower the subject. Formal comparison of woman-to-flower, singular emphasis on fertility, and the idealization of female sexuality are not to be found here. The images though striking (and in a few cases, rather disturbing) also avoid hyperbolic gestures of female identity that push and thus expose the cultural/masculine gaze to the nth degree. Don’t get me wrong: I am intrigued and even sometimes moved by traditional representations of woman and I appreciate extreme, deconstructive expressions of the feminine figure. My point is that Vis-A-Visage, as a concept and (mostly) in actualization, is aesthetically powerful because the artists seem to avoid stuffing “woman” full of more political agenda.

Rather, most of the drawings and paintings seemingly operate on the notion of palimpsest, weeding through the intertextual (distant and contemporary) history of feminine portrayal, then making their own marks on the wall (or in this case, face). Danielle Zimmermann’s, “Homage to Andy Warhol,” a series of printed shopping bags referencing Warhol celebrity portraits, first situates abstract female identity in the realm of the famous (a rather witty comment on the fame of this abstract She haunting art history), then from this context of pop-beauty or explosion of self, also explores subjective emotion. The figures in her project are cinematic with exaggerated facial gestures (a reference to Cindy Sherman), but also perhaps darkly reference turn of the 20th century studies in hysteria and the Freudian/Charcot-esque obsession with capturing female “moods” (see The Invention of Hysteria, MIT Press). Micki Tschur explores (with a raised eyebrow) the position of motherhood. Stylized pieces of a female face float throughout the five acrylic paintings on display, the figures ghostly and smiling in unison. Her investigation is playful (and humorous), but leaves a void: children are absent from the portraits, squaring her consideration of female identity on the social and private role of “mother” and not on mother-to-child relationships. Jenny Morgan and her collaborator, David Mramor use what could perhaps be called “negative palimpsest,” in which bright red paint from an under-layer is left exposed beside finished layers of paint. The two pieces executed in this way have all the connotations of emotional red, imply the “bodily” structure of a painting, and perhaps make a statement about the stripping of the actual female form (beauty ideals and domestic violence most immediately come to mind).

Beyond this, the exhibit as a whole succeeds at perhaps one of the most vulnerable, basic qualities of thoughtful portraiture: a disruptive, tender, sincere appreciation of mortality.

Curators: Ivar Zeile, Jessica Zewe and Brittany Schall

Exhibiting artists include: Danielle Zimmermann, Micki Tschur, Douglas Walker, Sandra Fettingis, Jenny Morgan and David Mramor

Vis-A-Visage is on-view at Object+Thought, 3559 Larimer St, through August 29th, for more info visit www.objectandthought.com