"Multiple Vantage Points" 03.24.07
AUTHOR: MICOL HEBRON 02.25.07-04.15.07 Barnsdall Art Park / LA Municipal Gallery
Presented as a complement to “WACK!” at MoCA, “Multiple Vantage Points” presents work created between 1980 and 2006 by fifty Southern Californian women artists. Unlike the exhibition that inspired it, this show doesn't emphasize revolutionary or overtly feminist pieces but instead celebrates the polymorphous diversity that second-wave feminists made possible in the careers of women artists who followed. There is an exciting and quirky range of artistic identities and practices on display, from craft-based objects to performance, figurative painting to video installation, photography to sculpture. It is interesting to note the oft-ignored parallels between these female artists’ styles and several California movements typically historicized as predominantly male, such as the Light and Space art of the '70s and the surf- and car-culture influences of the Finish Fetish era. Highlights include Catherine Opie’s full-body photographic portraits, Marnie Weber’s oneiric, paganistic video, Phyllis Green’s biomorphic ceramic sculpture, Sarah Perry’s inventive, punny book sculpture entitled Preature from the Black Lagoon, 2003, in which the eponymous “preature” emerges from a bible, and Ellina Kevorkian’s Pre-Raphaelite-inspired paintings of herself and her twin. Overall, the work is full of intelligent juxtapositions: frilly and formidable; Conceptual and essentialist.
http://artforum.com/archive/id=12957