La Cienega Area

Leza Lidow loads her oils with deceivingly humorous and deliberately macabre images. In “Holding Court,” a queen in a Marie Antoinette gown and tiara sports the head of a poodle. She struts regally in a semi circle of other female-dog hybrids whose nude bodies are perched on statuesque, furry legs. This rings of silly surrealism, but the thrust here is more disturbing than cute. Lidow uses the saturated, smoothly applied color, acute even focus and illogical Freudian concoctions of photo surrealism to lure us into nettlesome realizations about the female role through history. It is not simply perverse humor or an accident that Lidow makes “I Loathe Publicity,” a visual parody and a verbal contradiction. The work depicts a dog headed baroness preening ridiculously for some unseen camera. The show’s philosophical focal point is a triptych of a quaint cobblestone village dotted with clothes lines and romping children. Trapped inside the diaphanous drying laundry are the stiff, self conscious poses of nude women. Lidow would have done well to stop here. She also shows barely mediocre sculptures of paint splattered female mannequins that dilute her impact. (Ankrum Gallery, 657 La Cienega Blvd. to Nov. 11).