Thursday, January 29, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Women's glib

By Erika Yowell

Oh boy. If the current exhibit at the West Charleston Library gallery is any indication, the plight of the modern gal is a sad and vacuous one, imperiled by too much mascara and a "Sex in the City" aesthetic gone terribly awry.

Elisabeth Shurtleff's Modbroads: Irreverent Reflections on Modern Femininity showcases the artist's "satirical tongue-in-cheek takes on modern womanhood." Shurtleff has pasted together collages of fashion magazine vixens, and appears to have enhanced their Carrie Bradshaw-style proportions (think sizable noggin perched atop a teensy body) by manipulating the images with some sort of graphic design software. These chicks have big, wet eyes that manage (anemically) to recall John Currin's oddly proportioned neo-Durer cheesecake gals minus the big bosoms.

(Probably a more accurate comparison to draw would be to those pumpkin-headed hoochie girls who strut around all big-eyed and pissed-off-looking in recent Steve Madden shoe ads.)

It's all about the eyes, the hair, the lips and the outfits in Shurtleff's work, representing the sum total of the attributes we modern girls supposedly fixate on as a result of the creeping influence of fashion magazine photography. One could argue, particularly in Las Vegas, that women are equally inspired by the porn-glam aesthetic, to which we would add melon-sized boobs to the above list of coveted body parts.

But Shurtleff is clearly going with the fashion spread thing here, so no outrageously proportioned mammaries are on view. Instead, we have works like "Joy," which figures a 1960s pixie-type with a thermometer in her mouth spilling a giant medicine cup full of cheery-looking, mod-colored pills. A mod pattern composed of mod hues of celery, salmon and maize borders the picture to the north and south, activating the scene in a zany, Mondrian's "New York Boogie Woogie"-sort of way. Satirical take on contemporary womanhood: We mod gals are crazy, but with a little pharmaceutical assistance, we can be happy to the point of delirium!

The work described above is about as incisive as Shurtleff's work gets. Indeed, no one will be accusing her of opening up any kind of meaty discussion on women's issues with this exhibit. Other pieces, such as "After the Party," which features another dead-ringer for Carrie Bradshaw, and the vaguely (very vaguely) provocatively titled "Sushi Girl" are barely even conceptual one-liners. In the former, a blonde in an evening gown lounges on a mod (surprise!) sofa with a cup of coffee and--well, that's it, actually. There is no discernible "satirical take" in evidence.

Compared to the balance of the show, which features blondes and redheads in abundance, the black-haired figure in "Sushi Girl" has a remotely Asian appearance. She sits in the center of the picture plane encircled by rainbow-colored mandorla (think Virgin of Guadalupe), a signifier of holiness. Her eyes are wide and almond-shaped, though. Maybe the Asian references in the piece are really just confined to its title and the large-sized chopsticks clutching a piece of tempura in the foreground.

Oh, God. That's awful. I guess you should beware of invoking unintended ethnic stereotypes while attempting to uncover meaningful subtext in Shurtleff's work. Grasping at straws can have unpleasant side effects, apparently.

The collective effect of this show is dull and vapid. As the products of satirical response to contemporary femininity, the work succeeds only on the most superficial level. Satire exaggerates and parodies its subject, while Shurtleff's magnified proportions stop far short of actual parody. Even theme park caricature artists manage to skewer their subjects more pointedly than Shurtleff does with these hollow confections.