By Meghan Tifft Catalyst

Send comments to: catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu

Nicholas Valenzuela Arizona Daily Wildcat Ass man (left) and Tit Man (right) are two pieces of art in the Bailey "Survey of Drawings" exhibit. The exhibit is part of a faculty art show currently at the University of Arizona Museum of Modern Art.

A drawing of a peacock blue woman wearing little else but Sunday pumps and socks greeted me on my way in to Bailey Doogan's show at the University of Arizona Art Museum. In this piece, called "Let It Pour," she was so contentedly staring at a raindrop on her forefinger, and she was such a glorious shade of blue, that I couldn't hold her wrecked thighs against her for a moment.

When I turned to the next drawing and saw the ghastly sag and sloppy knees of an aged woman standing amidst words like "Virgin/Whore," and "Angry Aging Bitch," my judgment remained suspended. And finally, at the unwholesome image of a man staring at his own flabby pec as he pinched it inside a frame titled "Tit Man," I caught the irony but left him to his curious self-examination without a single disapproving shake of my head. I had no choice. Doogan, the artist responsible for this morbid little soiree, was compelling me not to pass judgment on any one of these very revealing, and honestly disturbing, portrayals of the human figure.

Doogan, currently a professor of painting and drawing at UA, explains in the written materials accompanying the exhibit that for this survey of drawings "Familiarity breeds redemption."

Doogan approaches each of her pieces with an assortment of materials - from pastels, charcoal and collage on gessoed paper to aluminum dust, acrylic and scratch board. If one looks closely into the gessoed array he or she might see that Doogan's work harbors one little bitty, pet intellectualism: Doogan puts words and phrases among her human forms to point out the charged associations between the world of language and the world of flesh. The small barrage of foul speech and other phrases Doogan uses are intended sometimes to edify and other times to misrepresent the bodies in her drawings. Her exhibit has a "words becoming flesh whether it means anything or not" undertone to it.

As a result, the virgin and the whore look almost identical and equally wretched, the woman who seems to be saying "no" is really saying "yes" to something the viewer isn't allowed to understand, and additional versions, "Ass Man" and "Leg Man," appear in the same indecent manner as "Tit Man." This strange experience that has been arranged inside the art museum shows just how well Doogan knows what everyone else knows - that triple the oddity and triple the vulgarity mean triple the fun.