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Drawing from outdated obstetrics manuals, Latham's work is a meditation on medical treatment as torture.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.