Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Holly Otterbein

Through her paintings on wood, J.L. Schnabel aims to explore the once-common medical diagnosis called "female hysteria." Her subjects — with their thick bangs, raven-black locks and candy-pink lips — are quantifiably hysterical. Her inspiration for Blood Queen is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian serial killer from the 16th century who slaughtered more than 600 innocents. To most, Báthory is repulsive. But in Schnabel's painting, she is a sexy femme fatale — head tilted back in ecstasy, eyes closed, blood splattered across her face. Her other subjects, including a double-headed monster (pictured) and the executioner of Queen Marie Antoinette, are equally haunting and erotic.

It's hard to tell if Josh Rickards truly loves the '70s, or just enjoys poking fun at them. He decorates his acrylic paintings with the decade's beloved props — burly men, sandals, sickeningly bright colors, feathered haircuts, enormous glasses, plaid. But then he dirties them up: In Bill and Hillary, based on a well-known photograph of the young Clintons, Rickards paints red, bulbous noses onto his subjects, saturates the image's colors till they look like Day-Glo, and throws a purple-striped wall behind the couple. The result is comical, but leaves you feeling like Rickards made a mess of your family's treasured photo album.

Try as philosophers, poets and 16-year-old girls may, love is hard to define. In this group show, more than 25 artists attempt to express it instead, with varied results. Some, like Melissa Nannen, focus on its physical allure: Her installation of fabric clams, called The Other Mouths (Give Them What They Want), is loaded with innuendo; conversely, her installation Love Ain't for Keeping, a penis-shaped cannon that blows bubbles, is fairly blunt. Other works are highly abstract, like Peter Kinney's Lookin' for Love, a finger painting made from chocolate, and June Blumberg's My Therapist, a mixed-media piece that shows animals grooming a smiling woman. While diverse, the works are all sensual, playful and humorous — which may be as good a definition of love as we can get.