Women’s work Hera Gallery showcases "Girl Art Now" BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Glancing at the list of 64 artists featured in Hera Gallery’s current show, "Girl Art Now," you could be concerned that this modest space might be overwhelmed. Or, alternately, that visitors to the exhibit would find themselves so inundated that it would be difficult to focus on any particular work. Rest assured that every effort has been made by the curator, Rhode Island School of Design professor Deborah Bright, to choose pieces that are so intriguing that you have to take a closer look. And the pieces have been given enough breathing room to make that entirely possible.

Spurred on by the re-examination of feminist art from the ’70s in the "Gloria" exhibit at the RISD Museum last winter and by an international survey of feminist art of that era planned for 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, gallery director Cynthia Farnell and Hera Gallery members felt that this year — their own 30th anniversary — would be an appropriate time to look at what kind of art is being made by and about women right now. What differentiates it from the art of the ’70s? And what does it owe to those artists?

In most ways, the work in "Girl Art Now" has built on the vision of those earlier artists and expanded on the issues they raised and the media they used, although certain media, such as digital photography and video, have opened up new outlets for creative expression. Many of the themes and/or emotional content in the pieces here are familiar from the first wave of feminist art, but there have been subtle shifts.

Representations of the male body seem less angry, more celebratory, whether in a color photograph by Laura Hartford, Eric with Flowers, in which a man’s serene face is encircled with flowers; in Sarah Elizabeth Miller’s sardonic T-Bone, a phallic rendering in lipstick on canvas; or in Erin Anderson’s eye-catching turquoise-and-gold Pharaoh, the Egyptian ruler holding a bunch of grapes near his come-hither smile.

Female mythical characters also appear, in Patricia Jenks’s startling vertical swatchs of purple and pink, titled Phaedra’s Grief, and in Andrea Pitzer’s glowing, icon-like Atalanta-Hylaeus, in which Atalanta holds up a knife to kill one of two centaurs trying to rape her.

Violence against women occurs in several other pieces: a threatening gun (Ruth Ann Godollei’s Reticent); a woman with her mouth bloodied clapping her hand over another woman’s mouth (Barbara Rains’s Silenced); in Kate Hoffman’s tiny sculpture No, I did not ask to see your penis, in which two children and a man in a car stand in a miniature suburban neighborhood; and in the text accompanying Tara Conant’s photo of a New England saltbox, Murder Site — Robyn Jackson, West Springfield, MA. Similarly intense are the images of a pear-shaped heart wrapped tightly by a thorned vine (Julie Harris’s Slip), or a bulging, anatomically-correct heart with pins stuck into it (Allison Susanne Hoge’s Love Letters).

Other anatomical treatments are more humorous, such as the small cross-stitched pubic triangles by Danielle Bursk (Pubic Sampler); the gradual abstraction of a young woman’s blue-jeaned buttocks into butterfly-like creatures (Brooke Thomas’s Harpy); or The Rack, a painting by Vicki Sell, in which an orange-vested chest sprouts a deer head and antlers. Even in Theresa Mary Sporer’s Tool Belt with Cozies, in which screwdriver heads and hammer handles have been covered by soft, pastel-colored crocheted "cozies," the shapes become rounded and pendulous.

Three of the works above and several others use materials associated with women’s handcrafts. Gwen Mayer Samuels’s Hangs On Its Own is a felted wool piece; Rhoda Juels’s Fandango in Color is a yarn tapestry; Elizabeth Morisette weaves hair curlers onto fabric with cotton twine to create Beauty School Dropout. Other specifically feminine references abound in the show. Mj Viano Crowe uses a Fabiano paper outline of her own dress as the framework for the fascinating Wichita Girl, a collage of Native American images and words about the white buffalo. Women’s everyday work is memorably honored in two paintings: L.L. Melton’s The Steam Table at Betty’s Lunch, and Joan W. Savitt’s Tablecloth.

Providence resident Crowe is one of eight Rhode Island artists in "Girl Art Now," and there are many more with Rhode Island connections. Pawtucket resident Rebecca Siemering’s work is called Small Platter, which indeed it is, both the platter and its stand fashioned from sugar, glue, paper, and plastic. The photograph, Claudia Flynn’s Self-Portrait with Bindi, is also small, a black-and-white photo of her face with a filigreed bindi (often just a red dot) in the middle of her forehead, and the whole recessed in a wood and gilt Indian frame. Maria Scaglione, of Westerly, and Yolanda Del Amo, of Providence, also have photographs in the show. Both convey the kind of existential ennui captured in some of the ’70s art. Scaglione’s piece, The Dog, looks candid: a woman sits on her living room couch, a teenager sprawled under a chair beside her, patting one dog, while another dog, a husky, marches toward the camera. Del Amo’s Untitled, however, is a staged scene, with two women in profile, one leaning on a polished wood bar in a red silk blouse, the other in a kitchen a few steps up and behind the bar, standing near a stove in a housekeeper’s uniform, her mop nearby. Both are smoking cigarettes and both stare into their futures with a certain hopelessness.

Another local photographer uses an old-fashioned medium, the daguerreotype. Hilary Treadwell wanted to catch the evanescence of childhood and adolescence in a very elusive form, that of exposing a silver plate to very slow light. The result is the mysterious and haunting Her Legs/Her Shoes. Brown professor and Kingston resident Marlene Malik used the more newfangled digital video to film Relay Understanding, conversations with a mother and her two daughters about how and what they know about each other.

Providence resident Dayna Mondello’s site-specific installation Imaginary Fire is described by her as "smoke rolls and scarves in the grove. The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything." Mondello cites many sources for her work, including "crafting culture" and being a beekeeper, and she uses tree branches that are painted or draped with white plastic bags or embellished with red yarn to form the mobile-like piece that hangs in this show.

"Girl Art Now" is so varied and captivating that all comparisons fall away, and it must be appreciated on its own terms. Because of the large number of artists and the detailed content of much of the work, it’s the kind of show you want to take in slowly, absorbing what attracts you to a particular piece. The show’s broad range all but guarantees that you will be drawn to linger, if not over one piece, then certainly another.

"GirlArt Now"

At Hera Gallery, 327 Main Street in Wakefield, through July 10.