“Gender Benders”

Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 301 : Dec 2–8, 2010 

Emanuel Aguilar is the first man whom Woman Made Gallery has asked to curate one of its shows since it was founded 18 years ago—in response to the representational imbalance between men and women in the art world.

Aguilar, WMG’s preparator, and the River West gallery’s former coordinator Kristen Carter selected 20 artists for “Girl, Please!” The group show grew out of a 2010 College Art Association conference panel discussion about the current direction of feminist art spaces. “Emanuel and I felt that a gallery with a mission declaring only to exhibit the work of women must first explore what it means to be a woman,” Carter says. “Girl, Please!” which includes several male artists—another rarity for WMG—investigates what it means not only to be a woman but to have a gender.

As Aguilar and Carter planned their exhibition, Chicago artist Betsy Odom decided to limit “Tomboy,” which she curated for Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, to lesbian artists. While one show expands its gallery’s mission and the other limits its scope, both embrace gender identity as lived and expressed.

“Girl, Please!” alternately disassembles, acts out, questions, flaunts or dismisses cultural images of femininity. Some of its artists explore stereotypes: The male subject of Jennifer Greenburg’s photographJeffrey (from the series “Fancy”) strikes a pose in blazing makeup and a skintight black outfit. Cheri Charlton’s oddly beautiful watercolor Brooke and Cindy Make Dinner explores postfeminism through the tropes of Disney cartoons: A host of smiling chipmunks, birds and mice offers kitchen help to two doe-eyed women with impossible figures. The piece suggests a progression from children encountering their first representations of femininity to the women aspiring to ever-rising levels of “hotness” whom Ariel Levy describes in Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Other works imply that people can teeter between obvious signifiers of masculinity and femininity: The naked couples in Dana Ollestad’s video Playing With It meld seamlessly between the two genders. In her photographs, Heather Christoffer documents the daily lives of two transgender individuals at the start of a long process of transition (pictured) that is definitely not as seamless as Ollestad makes it look. Aguilar tells me that he and Carter “tried hard to find work that reflected real life,” and in that the show succeeds.

While increasing acceptance of alternative gender and sexual identities makes “Girl, Please!” possible, Odom points out that widespread discrimination still exists. “I had always assumed that taking the ‘look how cute Ellen is’ approach would eventually get the gender discourse into the mainstream and the hostility into the fringes,” she says. “But it’s becoming clear that waiting for that mythical tipping point is actually pretty damaging in the short-term.” She admits that “identity-based” shows risk being didactic or essentializing, yet she sees “Tomboy” as a tight community of six artists having a conversation about queerness.

The exhibition’s title recalls both the murkiness of gender identity and a lesbian stereotype. But one of its artists, Leeza Meksin, says “this show seemed to be an exception” to most identity-based exhibitions in that it avoids a homogeneous view of gayness, encompassing a wide range of tones and media. Only Kelli Connell makes her sexual orientation the centerpiece of her work, digitally transforming self-portraits (pictured) into photos of a lesbian couple. Dana DeGiulio marks the gallery walls from floor to ceiling with sweeping drips of thick black paint and primitive scribble drawings, challenging the stereotype of the bold male Abstract Expressionist painter à la Jackson Pollock. She calls the label of “tomboy” a “relief to take on,” though she might not have sought out the word on her own. Mary George took the label and ran with it, literally. She hosted an indoor 5K run at the exhibition’s opening and invited the crowd to join her in fashioning “natural” workout equipment from logs.

The theme of “Tomboy” gives DeGiulio’s installation and George’s performance Cult of the Endorphine—inspired by the natural highs of exercise and metal music—queer subtexts we might not recognize in other circumstances. Both “Girl, Please!” and “Tomboy” are “relentless in pointing out that everyone participates in the construction of gender,” Odom says, “whether they are conscious of it or not.”

“Girl, Please!” is on view through December 23; “Tomboy” closes January 7.