un'bound' art

Jennifer Holmes Arizona Daily Wildcat "Black Body Radiation(Box #1)" by Nancy Keyes is part of the new exhibit "WDAYANO?" now open at the Joseph Gross Gallery. The show will run until April 1.

Anybody who looks forward to such abuse better hurry and attend because the show lasts only until tomorrow and soon the 10-foot phallus will be caged and gone.

Not to pander to anyone's prurient interests, but this exhibit, entitled Bodies and Boundaries, offered many lascivious topics for opening sentences, like the wide, lumpy, naked woman standing against the wall, the green man masturbating, or "Strawberry Skank with Toxic Shock Syndrome." Then there was the giant penis made out of Harlequin romance novels. How's one to choose?

A table decked with food marks the transition between the Rombach Gallery and the Joseph Gross Gallery, which is a good thing. Pornography makes a body hungry. Descending the ramp into the Gross gallery, cookie in hand, "Black Body Radiation (Box #1)" presented itself in all of its descriptive detail. This representation of a "real space" phenomenon was constructed with a typewriter, a skate boot, x-ray film, and a number of other black, compressed objects.

These two exhibits, in the same building, force the question: What is this all about really, besides genitalia, time, space, and matter?

The pieces in the Rombach Gallery make exaggerated objects out of men and women to communicate a point. That point is: Some funky attitudes adorn sexuality in contemporary society. Masculinity, for example, is linked with masturbation fantasies and firm pecs that don't look like ballooning breasts. According to one painting, men are as formless as Jell-O when stripped bare of society's robes and they are very sad about this.

Women, on the other hand, are just nasty. They put their monthly thing all over the men. They have huge, lumpy thighs and fat hips so they can bare children. When their bodies are not considered in terms of their function, however, women are supposed to show something else entirely. They must be of aesthetic quality and well preserved, like Barbie chopped up and saved in wax receptacles.

The exhibit that just opened in the Joseph Gross Gallery is quite opposed to exaggerating objects, or even making distinct representations of things. The artists displayed here agree that the supposedly reliable process of science is actually just another thing that is subject to interpretation. The name of the exhibit gives its challenge away: WDAYANO? "What do you know?" A provocative question indeed, meant in this case to go unanswered. Nevertheless, visitors to the exhibit will explore what they know and adjust their parameters as needed.

After looking at some peculiar and indistinct photographs of fetuses belonging to one mammal or another, and interpreting digitally manipulated bird paintings as landscapes of the Midwest and African dunes, it's difficult to discern what one knows about anything. Then there's a map of Los Angeles - the first literal thing since the 10-foot penis up the ramp.

Wdayano? The map comes with a computer simulation where the viewer can pick out sites and explore the photographs of the artist. There was photograph of a particularly littered corner of Playa Del Rey beach, a very pleasant picture of Griffith Park Observatory and a number of more familiar spots. Wdayano - there is an individual reference point for everything.