Feminist Issues--in Fine Form

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Ventura College galleries are showing the work of three women artists--sculptor Polly Victor, assemblage artist Tari Brand and painter Marilyn Groch--whose art examines feminist issues, with varying degrees of intensity.

Victor’s bold work is fashioned from twisted, welded metal parts turned into funky, ornate sculptural contraptions that appear, deceptively, to have some utility or real-world function. She brings together bits of heavy metal--pipes, a crankshaft, a chain, an I-beam--and creates big, visceral pieces that slyly tinker with expectations.

“The Act of Finding” looks something like a torture device, while “Power Trip” wittily suggests errant circuitry, writ large. Victor’s work might be seen as archetypally masculine and machine-obsessed, but she manages to bash gender cliches.

Brand’s mixed-media pieces are more openly charged with psychological undercurrents and deal in narrative miniatures that question women’s societal roles. In “apostrophedress”, tiny headless plastic dolls are encased, crouching, in a larger wax torso, as if a punctuation mark in the societal scheme. “Mother Fertility Goblet” is a huge wax construction that hugs a gallery wall, like an imposing emblem of nurturing.

In the New Gallery, Groch presents “portraits without people,” unusual macro close-up still-lifes detailing everyday objects not normally deemed worthy of considering, let alone painting. Of course, the commonplace can be a lofty place to focus attention. With her goose-bumpy realist approach, Groch eloquently visualizes the subject of ashtrays, the multicolored wires in a junction box, lipsticks and crayons.

A pop art sensibility graces Groch’s work, with a domestic twist. These are treasures around the house, lovingly lionized.

* Polly Victor, Tari Brand and Marilyn Groch, through March 29 at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura; 654-6400, Ext. 1030.