Stomping on Unwanted Images of Women

Through her mixed media work, Los Angeles artist Rachel Lachowicz for the past few years has been exploring and commenting on what it means to be a woman in our society. Using elements uncommon to artwork, such as lipstick and face powder, as well as more typical art materials of glass, plaster and wood, she takes a wry look at the facades that women have been lured into accepting.

In her show at the Shoshana Wayne gallery, several bird cages covered with bright red lipstick hang from the ceiling. This piece is called “Coma.” In “Affected,” one mirror reflects a realistic view of oneself, the other an extremely thin variant. Her “High Heels” are nearly 5 feet high, and her “Self-Portrait” puts her face behind a hockey mask.

“My work represents the layering process that women go through,” Lachowicz said. “A woman encodes herself by the type of clothes she puts on, and by whether she does or does not use makeup. To me, there’s not much difference between makeup and a hockey mask, but to society that mask is horrific.”

After she received her bachelor of fine arts degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1988, Lachowicz made what she calls “macho art about art,” works that paid homage to various 1960s abstract and minimalist artists. But she felt a need to go beyond recreating art styles and to retort to some of the works that referred to women as objects.

Hence, in this show you will find “Red David,” a male torso, a la Michelangelo’s David--but cast in lipstick and plaster--that is her response to Yves Klein’s “Blue Venus.” “House of Cards,” two chairs and a card table piled with three-dimensional “playing cards” in the shape of penises, comments on Richard Sera’s “House of Cards” from 1969 and the chess match that occurred between Marcel Duchamp and a nude woman during Duchamp’s retrospective in Pasadena in the late 1950s.

Upon seeing her “House of Cards,” Lachowicz said men often ask her, “Who’s winning?”

The newest pieces in the show are behind glass, “still a facade, but it is transparent,” Lachowicz said. The image of what appears to be a woman sporting a mud mask in “1940 Vogue” comes from the cover of a 1940s Vogue magazine. The multiple images of “Catherine” include the magazine advertisement for Paloma Picasso sunglasses and an abstract image of a clown’s face underneath another ad that shows actress Catherine Deneuve with a splotch of paint on her nose.

“These works are not about the ads themselves, but about the display aspects of women,” Lachowicz said. “If women were in more decision-making positions, our world would look very different.”

Rachel Lachowicz at the Shoshana Wayne gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, through Nov. 2. Open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Call (213) 451-3733.

WOMAN OF STRENGTH: Since the women’s movement renewed itself in the 1960s, many women have been researching the past to identify female role models. In this search to recognize women of talent, heart, style and courage, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has emerged in recent years as an eminent archetype. Kahlo biographies, note cards and calendars bearing reproductions of her self-portraits and postcards with her photograph are everywhere.

A selection of her paintings is on view in the exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But for special insight into the woman herself, Louis Newman Galleries are presenting “The Unknown Frida: The Woman Behind the Work,” a collection of more than 30 personal letters and notes written by Kahlo, who became a painter only after she was severely injured in a bus accident at age 18.

The correspondence dates from 1938 to 1953, the same period of her life represented by the paintings at LACMA. The letters, documents such as the certificate of Kahlo and famed muralist Diego Rivera’s second marriage to each other, and a few photographs are from the collection of the Chelo Eckhardt family. Eckhardt’s mother and aunts were acquaintances of Kahlo, and friends of the Rivera family, especially his daughter, Ruth.

The collection includes a warm letter from Kahlo to Ruth, her stepdaughter, and a letter questioning the future of communism that is believed to have been written to Leon Trotsky, Kahlo’s confidant and lover; however, most of the letters were written to her husband, “Diego, child of my eyes.” In one letter she says to him, “I love you, as you know, more than my own life.”

But the letters to Rivera are more than declarations of love. Kahlo also writes of her own life, referring to a portrait she has just finished, an opening of her exhibition at the Gallery of Mexican Art, and an article she is writing. She comments on daily life, such as a phone call from a friend or the need for money, and details without any self-pity the pain she endured while hospitalized in New York for treatment of injuries suffered about 20 years earlier in the bus accident.

Dated April, 1953, the last letter Kahlo is known to have sent her husband is here. The shaky handwriting does not resemble the earlier fine script, indicating the great pain she suffered. In Rivera’s autobiography, he described Kahlo as “acidic and tender, strong like steel and delicate and refined like the wing of a butterfly, adorable like a beautiful smile and profound like the bitterness of life.”

“The Unknown Frida: The Woman Behind The Work,” at Louis Newman Galleries, 322 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, through Nov. 9. Open 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday and Monday. Call (213) 278-6311.

ELECTRIC ART: As we head into the 21st Century, some artists have put down their paint brushes and picked up computers to make art. “Artist and Computer,” an exhibit of 27 computer-generated works by 14 artists at the West Los Angeles City Hall Gallery, demonstrates that a computer can be a valuable tool for creating a variety of colorful, compelling images.

“You see the same things that you do in traditional painting and drawing--portraits, landscapes, abstract works--but the artists are using technology to create the images,” said Scott Canty, the gallery curator. “I found the images very interesting, and I think it is appropriate for artists to use computers as a medium. When they’re not stuck to traditional methods, artists can expand the borders.”

Barbara Sultan depicts a cactus landscape in “Purple Desert,” Ken Laramay focuses on a “Fading Starlet” with purple fingernails and William Brun looks at the artist at work in “The Making of Art.” “Shehina,” by Sheri W. Langer, recalls the portrait work by German Expressionist painters at the beginning of the century.

Preston Craig’s abstract “Duraburous” resonates with vibrant colors--red, black, green, blue, pink and violet. Bettina Brendel’s two works, “Light to Dark” and “Dark to Light,” use geometric forms that illustrate a spectral change from black to white with blue hues in between.

Brendel, who proposed the exhibition, explained that from the numerous functions of a software program, one can choose brush strokes, thicknesses of lines, circles, rectangles, etc., to create a wide range of effects. “Sixteen colors are offered that can be mixed in 16 million different hues and intensities,” she said.

“The digital image can be printed on paper by a wax or dye transfer printer. A Matrix camera can take a picture of the image inside the computer, or the screen itself can be photographed. Slides of these images can then be produced. Printing from a slide or disk is done by an ink jet printer or by using the Cibachrome method.

“It’s a new medium. What will be improved in the future is the transfer of the image from the screen to paper.”

Artists Victor Acevedo, Alex Alferov, Truda Chandlee, Dona Geib, Gloria Martin, David Nicholas, Robin Ryan and Karen Smith also are represented in the show. All but two of the 14 artists are volunteers in the Creative Computer Exhibit program at the California Museum of Science and Industry, where they demonstrate what can be done with a computer in terms of art. These sessions occur four times a day.

“Artist and Computer” at the West Los Angeles City Hall Gallery, 1645 Corinth Ave., West Los Angeles, through Nov. 1. Open 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday-Friday. Call (213) 237-1373.