Liberating Her Body of Artwork : Exhibit: Rachel Lachowicz puts a feminist spin on her Newport Beach show, saying obsession with looks can get in the way of accomplishment.

Talk about role reversal. For her first performance-art piece, Rachel Lachowicz dolled up two nude male models with cherry-red lipstick. She didn’t apply it to their lips, however; she smeared it on their chests, buttocks, thighs and penises, then had them lie face-down on pristine white canvases, creating artworks from their body prints.

“It was a little outrageous (but) lots of fun,” said Lachowicz. Her intent was to satirize--and sharply criticize--the way women are perceived and treated as objects, as well as to underscore men’s historic dominance in the art world. Her piece was a wry, feminist adaptation of Ives Klein’s 1960 Parisian performance, in which the French modernist slathered three nude female models with blue paint and had them rolled and dragged across canvases.

“His thing was just about (creating non-traditional paintings) with (what he called) living brush strokes--no one cared about how the women felt,” the artist said at her Los Angeles studio recently.

Lachowicz was raised to believe she “could do anything” but thinks society often says the opposite. She’s been exploring that notion for the past few years, and it’s the theme of her first solo museum exhibit, which is on display through Nov. 29 at Newport Harbor Art Museum.

“New California Art: Rachel Lachowicz” includes photographs of “Red Not Blue,” the performance she staged last month in Santa Monica, one of the body print pieces it produced, and six new conceptual sculptures. Some, like her former work, are made with lipstick and other cosmetics, which Lachowicz believes symbolize the repression of women and represent the imprint of a patriarchal society.

“Forensic Projection--Self Portrait,” for instance, consists of three cast heads that depict Lachowicz as she looks today at 28 and how she’d look at 58 and 88, her skin progressively wrinkled and saggy. Produced with the help of a Hollywood special-effects and forensics expert, they are made of pale pink face powder.

“Women have been culturalized to want to present themselves as desirable objects for men” using makeup to achieve that goal, she said. “If you’re obsessed with how you look, you spend your time doing that, rather than doing and being and making accomplishments.

“The cosmetic industry doesn’t want women to be liberated,” she continued, “because women might get the idea they don’t want to wear lipstick, and (cosmetic companies) want you to really care about wearing it.”

Like “Red Not Blue,” other pieces in the show “redo” famous works by some of history’s famous male artists, a tack she’s taken before. “Red David” (1991), for instance, is a plaster male torso, completely covered with melted red lipstick, that mimics Michelangelo’s David and is her answer to Klein’s “Blue Venus,” a bust of Venus, painted blue. This time, she puts a feminist spin on works by German modern artist Gerhard Richter and others who have made so-called color charts--paintings made up of myriad squares or rectangles of color. The kaleidoscopic pieces in her color chart series substitute rectangular metal containers filled with eye shadow, for paint.

Once again, her objective is to wryly criticize how men have dominated the limelight throughout art history, said Lachowicz, a San Francisco native who earned a bachelor’s degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1988.

“I’m not really saying it’s anyone’s fault, I’m not saying this or that curator didn’t include women in exhibitions, and there have been a few prominent women artists through history,” she said. “But they generally don’t get the respect male artists do. It even happens now. It may seem like a small thing, and people might argue, ‘Look, you’re just complaining,’ but it’s very humiliating when you’re in that position.”

Lachowicz has no problem calling herself a feminist but said she shuns hit-you-over-the-head activism, personally and professionally. While she wore a baggy sweater and clunky black boots and no makeup for the interview, she said she frequently wears lipstick and sees no conflict in simultaneously looking desirable and promulgating equality.

“As soon as you become an extremist, people don’t listen,” she said. “I’m not going to burn my bra, but I do want to be attractive and I want the position I deserve.”

She uses humor to avoid alienating audiences, she added. Take “Untitled (Lipstick Urinals),” three small cast plaster urinals covered entirely in melted red lipstick. It’s a “lighthearted” retort to Marcel Duchamp’s urinals, as well as other artists who have appropriated his iconic plumbing piece, she said.

“With humor, you can say, ‘I’m not sure this is how it is, but isn’t it funny?’ People are more apt to take in the information if it delights them in some way.”

While her work clearly is concerned with speaking out against the inequities she sees, Lachowicz doesn’t believe it’s art that merely reacts.

“A lot of women think that we were liberated in the ‘60s, but we’re still up against a wall and they have no idea the wall is even there,” she said. “So it’s not like I’m only saying, ‘No, I don’t like what you’re doing to me,’ it’s like I’m saying, ‘Wake up!’ ”

“New California Art: Rachel Lachowicz,” runs through Nov. 29, Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $4 adults, $2 students and senior citizens. (714) 759-1122.