by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
"Eye to I," an exhibit of female artists' works, fulfills the viewer like a hearty three-course
dinner.
The women use the concept of self-portraiture to define and disassemble themselves. They span their flaws and perfections, embrace or challenge their gender, explore their sexual roles within their cultures and remark upon the absurdity of it all.
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The upstairs at the Downtown gallery 516 ARTS draws together works from around the country - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Mexico.
The exhibition closes
Saturday.
It encompasses photography, sculpture, masterful painting techniques, mixed-media bookwork and electricity.
Sculptor Susan Byrnes from Dayton, Ohio, has a piece called "History" - a large cast-aluminum vanity mirror with a 60-foot silvery gray braid that extends from the mirror's center and drops into a heavy coil on
the ground.
"It's about reflection, about aging," Byrnes said. "It's very romantic in the sense of the vanity shape of the mirror. The shape is very specific to the piece, because it's that kind of classic 'mirror, mirror on the wall.' The mirror itself is very old with the silver flaking off in spots."
Hair symbolically holds our sense of power and identity,
she said.
"Hair holds a lot of our history in it, from its texture, its color, even for drug-testing purposes, they test your hair," she said. "When I was kid, there was this woman who lived on the corner behind these giant hedges. She was very old but had very long hair and these braids, and when she went by, it was very
frightening."
Painter Jennifer Nehrbass has a slightly frightening piece in the show called "Postulating Jane." A finely dressed woman dangles doubled over from a red rope in the middle of an atmospheric
nature scene.
"It's based on a 19th-century photograph of somebody getting a tuberculosis treatment," Nehrbass said. "There's kind of this quiet moment of helplessness that came out of it. The flowered skirt, she's outside, and everything's so appropriate, and there's no control over the situation."
Nehrbass entices the viewer with color, technique, lighting and attention to detail. Then, the viewer does a double take and realizes there is something off about the image. She aims to dismantle the traditional portrayal of women, she said.
"They get into the painting and realize there are other layers that are sexual, violent or off-putting," she said.
Claire Watkins, of New York City, uses electricity and lights to represent the inner workings of memory in her metal piece "Portrait of My Brain." There are 1,192 lights.
"I started that piece by writing down everyone I could remember from my life," she said. "I was imagining all these people that I knew sitting inside my brain somewhere. My criteria was I had to remember their name and
their face."
Watkins took copper circuit boards and etched away to reveal fiberglass, with motorized wires stroking the surfaces, thus triggering certain lights to light up at different times. Each light
signifies someone she remembers.
Also, be sure to check out Juliana Coles' famous, gigantic, content-rich, handmade mixed media journals - a lifelong project she has worked on since she
was 11.
She calls it "extreme portraiture."
