Women’s Works

The “Feminine Form” varies radically in the current group show at Studio Channel Islands Art Center, and vive la difference. That most venerable of artistic subjects, the female form, presents an inherent challenge for contemporary artists, who seek to tap into the timelessness of that terrain but want to find new paths to expression within it.

This built-in tension can yield art that questions both itself and its tradition, which seems to exhibit an underlying commonality in the otherwise diverse sculptural work in the gallery. By turns ironic, angry, celebratory and--fleetingly--classical, the four artists here, all of whom have connections with Cal State Northridge as alumni or faculty, explore the feminine form from separate angles.

Kathleen Waggoner is a fine sculptor in a traditional sense, combining conventional sculpture attributes with experiments in narrative and cross-cultural references. She shows a debt to African mask-making culture with a few busts of proud African women and ornately decorates nude figures with carving-like patterns on her series, “Scars of My Own Design.”

In her most striking series of work here, in bisqued porcelain, she roughly surveys the arc of a marriage gone sour, with a refreshingly unabashed rancor. The white “Virgin, Believer of Dreams” finds its subject with a blissful smile, a dream-flecked castle in the background. The face grows dour and the palette darkens in “Death in the House of Love,” with its subject now circumspect and pregnant. Finally, her indignation yields to “The Eloquence of Rage,” with its subject now a fang-bearing, semi-serpentine figure whose chains are broken. A series of tiny hearts dangle in her chest cavity, suggesting renewed availability to the romance game.

In some ways, Alexandra Morosco’s several sculptures are the most traditional pieces in the show, and yet she has her own range of personal artistic issues at stake in her work. Nude female forms, and fragments thereof, are interwoven into beautiful hunks of stone, as if players in an aesthetic dialogue between subject and ground.

The ambiguity is becoming, and part of the central theme in works like “Tiger Shrimp Woman,” a hybrid of animal, human and abstract forms, or “Nursing the Raven.” In “Trampolina,” a female form is enmeshed in stone but seems to seek deliverance. She arches majestically, in a gesture of liberation, or a desire for it.

Feminine forms in Molly Schulps’ large, enigmatic relief works are assembled from hunks of ceramic into mutant puzzle-like shapes on the wall. These larger- and lumpier-than-life figures exert both the traditional flatness of art on the wall and the physicality of sculpture. Beyond the intriguing strangeness of their appearance for art’s sake, they also address topics relevant to being female, as in the playfully named “Got Milk” and the sober reminder that is “Breast Exam.”

In a way, the centerpiece of the exhibition is the work of David Elder, a retired teacher from Cal State Northridge, who has been producing a peculiar and distinctive series of wooden sculptures in recent years. In the series, elaborately carved and veneered female torsos are adorned in all manner of clothes. Usually, their gaudy garb--most often carefully emulated in wood--reveals as much as it conceals, and the sculptures bear such names as “Coco,” “Dee” and “Faith.”

Several examples of Elder’s series appear on a three-tiered platform, made to appear like a shrine of ambiguous, or multifaceted, intent. The presentation suggests retail displays or fashion show parades of fancifully draped but ultimately anonymous female models. The viewer never gets to know Dee or Faith or the others as anything more than fragmented clothes horses.

Elder’s work is a fascinating paradox, with its body-obsessive, craft-intensive, elegant aspects blending in with a touch of tawdriness. His art points to society’s media-fueled fixation with this topography of the feminine form (look at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for a timely example), without divorcing himself from said fixation.

But Elder has the benefit of classical cultural tradition on his side, dating back to the Greeks and beyond.

DETAILS

“The Feminine Form,” through March 3 at Studio Channel Islands Art Center, 79 Daily Drive, PMB 270, Camarillo. Gallery hours: Thurs-Sat., noon-3 p.m; 383-1368.

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