A Woman’s Intuition

MB Hanrahan’s new show at Natalie’s Fine Threads, Upstairs Gallery, is an agreeably funky and funny affair, fueled by the kind of bubbling-over creative energy Hanrahan has long shown in her local mural work. By those inherently complex narrative standards, in fact, the art here is a model of restraint and focus.

For good controversial measure, she enjoyed the sting of official action last Saturday, when the Ventura police towed away her “art car” from in front of the gallery.

Her exhibit goes by the title “In Bardo,” from the Tibetan word meaning a state of being “in-between.” Fittingly, Hanrahan’s art often covers issues of transition. Often, the transitions in question concern female identities and archetypes, as with the cheeky interplay of melons and fondled breasts in “Girls of Illusion.” A mutant Scorpion woman appears as if on a surreal circus poster in “Strange Girl.”

Further warm winds of irreverence inform her series of photographic self-portraits, cloaked in guises and disguises. We find the frankly nude artist, clouding the issue of her own nudity by wearing a pumpkin in “MB Pumpkinhead” and, in another, with her head puncturing a paper peace sign and with a slogan scrawled on her belly: “Let Elvis Die!”

On the face of it, this work seems to address the necessity of moving past cherished social and cultural icons. But Hanrahan is loose enough with her approach to this art that any easy, serious interpretations may be half-truths, subject to change.

* MB Hanrahan, through Nov. 22 at Natalie’s Fine Threads, Upstairs Gallery, 596 E. Main St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday; 643-8854.