Also this issue: Paradise Redefined -Susan Hagen First Friday Focus Politics Unusual -A.D. Amorosi Becoming: Shakespeare -Debra Auspitz The Outside In -Sam Adams Anatomy Lessons -Meredith Broussard The (Un)Beat(en) Generation -Paul Burress All-Ages Art -Sam Adams

October 3- 9, 2002

art

Cloaking Devices

Susan Fenton, White Dress, Red Headband (2002), 22 inches by 22 inches, hand-painted photograph.

Susan Fenton and Anne Seidman create revealing work that plays hard to get.

by Robin Rice

Offering or withholding? The question arises when surrounded by a group of Susan Fenton’s ambiguously costumed portrait-format photographs. In their physicality they are rich and voluptuous, but contact with the subject’s personality is denied by masks, blindfolds and turned backs. Fenton hand-tints each photograph with subtle color, animating motionless flesh with the illusion of blood pulsing beneath the skin. Downy hairs at the nape of the neck glint and sprinklings of moles, never so appealing in real life, become dark constellations inviting contemplation.

Fenton has typically dealt with the figure, frequently masked, often embedded in a geometric, austere context with hints of mysterious ritual. Her recent work, on view at Schmidt/Dean Gallery, is more restrained than ever, frontal or back views of symmetrically posed women. Hair is concealed by caps or helmets of leather or satin or, in one case, a black sculpted wig (maybe Japanese). Frequently the eyes are bound -- not tightly, but securely. If exposed, they are downcast in a passive, penitent or postulant gaze.

There is one slightly ominous exception: the eyes in Black Veil Silver Stole look into ours through a wrapping of black lace, dark pupils breaking the pattern of lace, which completely obliterates the nose and mouth. The suggestion is of a living prey to some predator, immobile, knitted into a spider's web. Another insectile allusion might be in Profile with Purple Boa, in which the model's neck appears to curve into a glossy pupalike thorax. Wrapped White Torso is notable for the head wrapped in something like white gauze that is marked with blurred red lipstick bleeding through the layers in one of Fenton's rare hints of motion, even violence.

Bondage of a sort is clearly depicted in leather belts and strange embracing cylinders, particularly a spool of red fiber in Red Rough Wrap that engulfs an entire body. A sense of ceremony is enhanced by careful poses and the seeming pliancy of the subject. Unusual contemporary fibers propose an intriguing relationship or balance of dominance between the natural and manufactured worlds. Though much vulnerable and objectified skin is displayed, it's chastely erotic and somewhat androgynous.

Fenton has worked this territory effectively for years. Of the six artists participating in "IMPRINT: A Public Art Project," the Print Center's citywide billboard, bus shelter and paper cup exhibition (215-735-6090 for information), she is one of the most likely to accomplish the program's plan to subvert advertising through public art. Her work is frankly beautiful in color and form and features attractive female models. Nevertheless, it projects an ambiguity that may bring viewers to question what they see. Of course, the best advertising does the same thing, so the line between the two genres is already quite blurred.

Strangely, in spite of the seemingly huge budget that was supposed to make IMPRINT visible all over town, many people have remarked that they have only read about the show, not encountered the billboards or received artist-designed paper cups distributed by coffee shops. This does not mean that the Print Center failed to get maximum art exposure for its bucks, but that advertisers spend even more impressive sums to place their products inescapably before the public eye. So, on the way to Schmidt/Dean, keep your eyes open for unusual billboards and coffee cups with pictures of masked women.

Anne Seidman seems to challenge herself to eliminate as many things as possible from her work without capitulating to monochrome. Her painting is non-objective, not calligraphic, not about shadows or fields or layers. It's mostly based on squares and rectangles but without actually succumbing to rigorous right angles. It's colorist without subscribing to readily identifiable palettes.

At Schmidt/Dean, Seidman is showing what looks like three distinct bodies of work: grid-related colored pencil drawings on paper, small grid-related paintings combining many types of water-based paint and larger paintings that are mostly whited-out.

The drawings consist of chunks of horizontal ruled lines, not quite parallel, in a variety of springlike colors. They are unpresuming and charming. The smaller paintings play with shapes and colors in an almost arbitrary fashion. As one looks around the gallery, certain colors are repeated, particularly a lavender and a whitish aqueous green. Some of the smaller works seem to deal with the idea of horizons or layers.

The larger white-out paintings look most heavily worked. There is lots of lumpy paint underneath the dense top layer of matte white that masks most of the surface. Narrow edifices of shapes including occasional accidental features like drips have been spared, curious survivors. There's a sense of insouciant struggle or exploration in Seidman's process. The shapes, mostly rectangles, often appear stacked but almost humorously unstable. No doubt these paintings wear well. They happily engage the eye, but never annoy with pretension or pronouncements or exaggerated friendliness.