Gender Generated

The female form comes in many shapes, sizes, textures, political stances and degrees of abstraction in the current show at G. Childress Gallery in Ojai. Gender is the issue around which the art revolves in the aptly titled “Real Women,” from four artists--who happen to be women--familiar to anyone who has taken the annual Ojai Studio Artists tour in the fall.

In this crazy-quilt exhibition of Ojai-based artists, each artist is sufficiently different from the other in form and content to make for a vibrant display. Gayel Childress herself continues exploring nudes in fresh ways, while sculptor Sylvia Raz uses material as varied as painted wood, knitted wool and nails for her quirky figures.

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Ruth Farnham crosses the line between abstraction and figuration in her easygoing paintings, while Alberta Fins plumbs deeper into questions of identity and artistic methods. Somehow, they all get along together under one gallery roof.

As if standing guard in one corner of the gallery, we find “‘Mexican Volcano,” a curious mixed media tribute to the noted Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, by Fins. Kahlo defied the male-dominated art scene of her day (and endured her husband Diego Rivera’s philandering), and her bold self-portraits are emblematic of the empowerment of the female artist, especially in this part of the world.

Fins actually took a faithful likeness of Kahlo’s face, painted by Pete Reichert, and adorned it with her own touches, using a generous gush of materials including chemically melted fabric, tulle for a bridal reference and wood for a crown of thorns. Kahlo becomes a beauty, martyr, suffering bride and vision of self-determination, all in one.

The bridal theme continues in Fins’ “Bride Series,” with figures that look both ceremonial and a bit ominous, ghost-like. As with much of Fins’ art, her process is central to the end product: She fuses, abuses and otherwise alters her materials, subjecting them to processes that change the very nature of the material. Metamorphosis is key, in both the making and the perception of her art.

Farnham’s paintings have a warm, ethereal quality, viewing the world through the filter of Impressionism and asking us to fill in the blanks. In “Village Women-Gujarat,” ambiguously drawn, hooded women are seen in a forested scene, but the overall impression is more dreamlike than real.

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In her own way, Childress also finds expressive routes between things real and imagined and between the cracks of different art genres. Her showpiece here is “Once Upon a Pedestal,” a large, floor-to-ceiling diptych in which the vague references to a nude woman’s contours are swimming in a warm palette of yellows and red tones. It’s possible to read the piece as a contrast and an answer to the conventional presentation of the nude female form as an object on a pedestal.

Like Fins, Raz veers around common artistic methods, but with a generally more playful air. Sitting in the center of the gallery is a recent creation, “The Second Coming of Eve,” a woman in a rocking chair, knitting, fashioned from the artist’s own ambitious knitting project. “Nail Woman” is a stylized figure, decorated with a colorful bed of nails.

Raz’s wooden sculptures mix figures and furniture-making craftiness, but they’re not always as frivolous as we might expect. Her “Venus de Cancer,” for instance, portrays, in a three-dimensional variation on Leger’s “Machine Cubism,” a woman whose breast (a drawer knob, in fact) has been removed. It’s a sad sight, of course, but also hopeful, an image of recovery.

At its best, the show grapples with some serious subjects with a lightness of being and an obvious passion for making art.

DETAILS

“Real Women,” through July 2 at G. Childress Gallery, 319 El Roblar in Ojai. Gallery hours: Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; 640-1387.

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Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.