Contradictions of Motherhood Brought to Life

“Mothering a child is really not much like playing with dolls,” according to artist Leah Younker. “It’s much richer, more chaotic, exhausting and important.”

Younker’s written statement is as concise and true as the installation she created in collaboration with Alice Finney at Sushi Gallery downtown (852 8th Ave.). Their work, “Life in a Doll’s House” (through Nov. 24), knocks stereotypes and expectations on their heads with the blunt power of contradictory facts. The dollhouse, a realm that can be controlled and perfected, has no equivalent in day-to-day life, Younker and Finney assert. Harsher, more complex realities govern the real world.

The approximately 6-foot-high walk-in dollhouse they have constructed in the lobby/gallery area at Sushi is a microcosm of society itself, where the sentimental glories of parenting clash with the hardships imposed by economic, political and sociological realities. Statistics and other written assessments of the situation are incorporated into the typical furnishings of a dollhouse kitchen: they hang on the wall in the style of needlepoint samplers, or are painted across potholders, open books, calendars and dustpans.

There is no consensus on the long-range emotional impact of leaving children in day care while their mothers work, one of the texts asserts. Another states that 79% of all black children in households headed by women live below the poverty level, and another proclaims that even in households where the mother works full-time, she still does 70% of the domestic chores. “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World” appears on one framed panel, its fundamental truth negated by all that surrounds it.

Younker, who teaches art at Mesa College, and Finney, a local sculptor, have decorated their miniature house with pink floral cushions and lacy lampshades, then undermined its charm with these unsettling facts. The resulting subtle but effective tension also extends beyond the front and back doors of the house to other segments of the installation.

Three dolls placed to look like they’re in a tea party just outside the house, for instance, present three different visions of motherhood. One sits on a shabby high chair, holding a dirty diaper. Another, elegantly dressed, carries a frying pan, and the third tears her hair out in anguish over the five howling youngsters perched on her body like flies.

Though many contemporary artists, both male and female, have scrutinized the impact of the media on shaping women’s identities, few have focused their gaze intently on the subject of motherhood. Child-rearing, it seems, is not a very sexy issue, but Younker and Finney prove that, with enough wit, wisdom and subversion, it can be the stuff of provocative art.

Roz Dimon calls her computer-generated prints, now at the Verbum Gallery of Digital Art (670 7th Ave., through Nov. 30), “Techno-Romanticism.” Unfortunately, any romantic notions that may have filtered through Dimon’s mind were squelched by the time she turned out these slick, glossy productions. In an all-too-common reversal of priorities, Dimon has given her technical process far more complexity than either the form or content of her work.

These laminated Cibachrome prints and transparencies, made from slides taken of images on her computer screen, are large and loud but nearly devoid of meaning. The mirror-slick surfaces, luscious Cibachrome reds and scribbled and drawn designs do convey a certain exuberance, albeit one that attaches itself equally to a new pair of shoes or the New York skyline.

“Rose,” a subdued study in aqua, coral, pale mauve and black, is mildly seductive, a comma, or pause among the surrounding exclamation points. Here the grain is finer than in the larger prints, and a dialogue is begun between this digitized look, the checkerboard pattern of the background and the humble, organic rose.

In most of the other prints, Dimon exploits the dot-like pixels (picture elements) that make up the low-resolution image on her screen. She makes the pattern so large and visible that it seems the raison d’etre for her creations, for there’s little evidence of any other.