The Pierro Gallery at Baird Center
3 Mead Street, South Orange
Closes: April 10
Pierro Gallery’s outstanding exhibition Female Hysteria is by turns subversive, smart, funny, and an out-and-out gorgeous must-see.
“It’s impossible to describe the energy in the room,” said exhibit mastermind and curator Blake Smith, South Orange’s arts and cultural affairs manager at the opening. “It was wild.”
A few words about the exhibit’s title: Female hysteria is a discredited medical diagnosis named for hystera, the Greek root for uterus. Ancient physicians believed that unless anchored by pregnancy, the organ wandered through the female body. More modern ones held that it was the source of the female sex’s emotional and mental weakness.
The exhibit responds to both historical and contemporary misogyny, antifeminist rhetoric and discriminatory practices.
“Since art school, I have always been drawn to women’s voices and points of view,” Smith said. “At a moment when women’s rights feel increasingly fragile, this exhibition feels especially urgent. I curated this exhibition very intentionally, selecting artists whose work felt deeply compelling and grounded in strong female perspectives.”
Smith also designed the show and had high praise for Brian Rumbolo who installed it.
Martialing deepest pinks, blues and browns punctuated by emotionally charged, bright red mouths, the faces and postures of Penn’s women speak loudly, often poignantly. Her Illustrated Sport condemns the objectification of women’s body for profit. Headless, an arm limp, all focus is on the bikinied torso and a descending male hand.
In Galkin’s quartet of stylized portraits, women look inward and stare outward against backgrounds of floating floral shapes. Pensive, defiant? Invent back stories for each.
The exhibit first formed in Smith’s imagination when viewing Nan Ring’s paintings during this April’s Manufacturers Village studio tour.
“From there, the show grew organically,” Smith said.
Profiled in depth in an earlier Arts Beat, Ring is both an honored visual artist with prodigious technical skills and a much-published poet and writer. Salt Kitchen, her three arresting monumental canvases, one each on three of the gallery walls, share strong narrative intent with Ring’s love of paint and formal considerations of space and time.
Each canvas has a commanding female figure. Their statuesque, translucent bodies float in and out of a pictorial space splintered into multicolored shifting planes. Each is metaphorically tethered to a ghostly cooking range and tied to history, both personal and writ large. In Hunger, bowls filled with batter cascade from the work table. Haunting faces observe: outside the window or ancestral memories?
“I have completed three of these paintings so far, each 75 x 58 inches. I envision thirteen altogether, a “’baker’s dozen,’” Ring said. “The imagery is based on thirteen stanzas of my original prose poem written in response to the current state of the world and about my immigrant family of bakers who moved to America to survive.”
Ring’s shocking pink Fresh out of Milk (seen on the exhibition’s poster at end) and the green and blue Election Cake. Each demure, shirt-waisted, aproned woman is painted representationally–1950s June Cleavers. Their faces are featureless abstractions in thick impasto. In Election Cake pointedly bright-orange batter cyclones off the handheld mixer: Chaos reigns.
Turning to the show’s more three-dimensional pieces, the celebrated and endlessly inventive artist Kate Dodd takes center space. Dodd has large-scale installations nationwide and had a dominant work at the New Jersey Arts Annual this past winter. Here, cunning constructions enchant from a distance and devastate close up. Tiny, midcentury illustrations of weapons of war—a medieval mace, a high-power rifle—spill from a phallic Horn of Plenty. Step inside her Disaster Cyclorama. Seen from the outside, its jagged exterior casts ominous shadows –a “foreboding silhouette,” Dodd said.
Seen from within tiny illustrations of environmental catastrophe spill one toxic meltdown into the next. (See an exhibition viewer in place above.)
Like Ring, the internationally exhibited sculptor Jamie Levine ushers us into the “women’s sphere,” i.e. the kitchen. In her arresting chimeras, women become one with their kitchen tools. In an untitled work, there’s a high-heeled shod foot/broom made from plaster, corn husks and embroidery thread. Shown here is Levine’s wood, hydrocal and metal arm/rolling pin. (Motherhood). All are fabulous in all connotations of that word.
Melissa Johnson deftly transform delicate porcelain tableware of “raised pinky” (Johnson’s words) sensibility into teacups of confrontation by adding calligraphic inscriptions: Hell Hathe No Fury (like a woman scorned to complete the phrase). Demure But Demented, Madwoman and Hysterical are others in the series. You get the idea. Each cup and plate is fully functional but handwash.
Finally, beauty and delicacy juxtapose with feminist politics in the hands of two master artists in ceramics. Krista Punsalan’s titles unlock meanings in her deceptively beautiful, symbolic porcelains Like Mother, Like Daughter and Blossoming Rage (shown). Punsalan will donate proceeds from sales to Planned Parenthood. If one of Johnson’s porcelain cups (not on view here) screams “I am not your vessel,” multimedia master artist Michelle Kurlan Schneider’s three remarkable glazed raku vessels of similarly multiple meanings will draw you in.
