Pandora’s Box: Bodies of Work
Chitra Ganesh Dazzle 2006
The travelling exhibition “Pandora’s Box” is perhaps guilty of restating the importance of the body in art made by women. Granted, some might see this as a welcome visceral reaction to what has turned into a year or more of heady and historically based exhibitions concerning feminist practices.
Yet that's not to say “Pandora's Box” isn’t full of ideas. Each of the 10 artists in this show offers a unique take on the feminine realm—the proverbial box that, once opened, changes the world forever. Visitors to Plug In ICA will be challenged, confronted with issues of class, ethnicity, empowerment, domesticity and of course that all-encompassing relationship to the body.
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Leesa Streifler Parenting Revisited: portrait at 5 and 15 years 2008 Courtesy of the artist |
Leesa Streifler offers versions of her relationship to her own body, one that is both aging and giving life. Streifler’s Life Force in Two Realms (the social and the spiritual) is a modest-seeming standout in a show of powerful work, relaying the artist’s personal struggle with carpal tunnel syndrome in acrylic on paper. A nebulous figure floats in a murky green sea, her club-like hands hanging at the ends long, tendril-like of arms.
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Mutu Wangechi Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co New York |
Amy Cutler's tiny drawing features a woman whose head is replaced by a wire basket of eggs as she shoos away deer with a shotgun. This whimsy is welcome among more serious work, such as Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors. A reminder of the fragility of the body, Mutu’s dozen digital prints with mixed-media embellishments based on anatomy textbooks are outstanding in terms of picturing the complex relationship between women and science, between knowledge dissemination and self-awareness. The artist's use of black sparkle adds an important element of play in depicting a rich mess of hair, riffing on commercial advertisements for feminine hygiene products, cosmetics and possibly National Geographic as well.
A selection of Annie Pootoogook's drawings offers a standard look at the artist's representations of domesticity in contemporary Northern life—exactly what we’ve come to expect from her. It would have been nice to see work by Pootoogook, or from many of the other active cultural producers in the North, that instead examines the history of women in their communities.
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Annie Pootoogook Composition (Outpost Camp), Cape Dorset 2003–4 Courtesy of Feheley Fine Arts |
Myth also could have been a good topic for Pootoogook. Chitra Ganesh's Dazzle indicates as much. In this digital print from 2006, the artist presents a pastiche of Indian lore with contemporary comic-book flair.
Curatorially, the Dunlop Art Gallery’s Amanda Cachia has cast a broad net, collecting work by artists from several countries—though for some reason focusing exclusively on two-dimensional work. I lament what was lost from the original presentation in Regina: Kara Walker’s first film has been replaced by four stills. A print stands in for a massive mural by Ganesh. Artists like Streifler and Shary Boyle are represented with work from more than one series, which should have been narrowed down. Then other artists, like Amy Cutler, are under-represented.
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Kara Walker Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions 2004 Film still Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co New York |
Still, there are more gems in this exhibition, including untitled drawings by Laylah Ali. Caught somewhere between facility-fuelled constraint and complete imaginary abandon, Ali’s work could be a 13-year-old’s imagining of ethnographic studies in the year 3000, or perhaps the exact opposite—they could represent relics from a civilization so far gone, so ambiguous regarding gender and sexuality, that only Pandora’s box could contain them.
Overall, given Plug In ICA’s awkward space, “Pandora's Box” is installed with unnecessary conservativeness. It relies heavily on a single line around the gallery, with few clusters. There’s no attempt to create a physical container from which all of this fantastic work could have exploded. (286 McDermot Ave, Winnipeg MB)
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Layla Ali Untitled 2006–7 Courtesy of Gallery 303 |
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