MEN ARE
HEARD FROM IN A VARIETY OF VOICES
The
Orlando Sentinel
Published: Sunday, July 3, 1994
Section: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Page: F4
By Philip E. Bishop Sentinel Correspondent
Once a group
of women artists had mounted an exhibition at Orlando's Warehouse
Gallery, did a men's show necessarily follow? Is this tokenism?
Is it patronizing? No, it's just art - and art of considerable
range and interest. There is certainly a certain brawny masculinity
in Robin VanArsdol's ''Double Scream,'' which features two anguished
heads cut out of an automobile hood. It's a pop variation on
Edvard Munch's familiar masterpiece ''The Scream.'' VanArsdol's
inspiration in graffiti art gives this and a companion sculpture,
''Fishy,'' an improvisational verve, although ''Fishy,'' a kind
of underwater crucifix, has an undercurrent of religious symbolism.
There is an existential loneliness to Shawn Simon's installation
titled ''The Fallen Empire as Anguish and Ecstasy Loom Above.''
An abstract figure of welded steel hangs above a corroded arsenal
of munitions that might be leftovers from any 20th century war.
Simon's eerie sculpture might be taken as a comment on the short-lived
''New World Order.''
A traditional subject for men is - of course - women, but the
subject takes a bizarre twist in William Latham's ''Atlas of
Obstetric Technic,'' an installation of found objects and sculpture.
Drawing from outdated obstetrics manuals, Latham's work is a
meditation on medical treatment as torture. From a woman, surely
this piece would feel righteously angry; from a man, it seems
more perplexed and faintly regretful. Zoey Stevens' sinuous
rendering of a nude woman is more conventional but hardly reassuring.
Stevens, who has recently decorated a local nightclub, gives
this glossy figure an incendiary fingertip, as if she could
consume the world in flames.
There is other worthy art here. Carl Knickerbocker's refreshingly
straightforward ''Science, Sociology, and Statistics'' is a
commentary on compartmentalized lives. Zon Neto calls his abstract
tracings in black a kind of ''tribal'' art. Richard Hildreth's
orange and blue ''Cry Babies'' seem to fill the gallery with
their shrieks.
The show is anchored, after a fashion, by one of Johann Eyfells'
''cloth collapsions,'' layers of canvas that bear corroded images
of rust and decay. The venerable Eyfells recently exhibited
his ''collapsions'' in the United Arab Emirates.
With the work of VanArsdol and Eyfells alongside younger artists',
this exhibition is also about generations - fathers and, if
not sons, then at least nephews.
