Behind the Bubble-Wrap Curtain: Undressing the Feminine

  Like Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture in Millenium Park in Chicago, which was renamed by the public "The Bean", gallerina Mindy Solomon's Undressing the Feminine  may be remembered as the "Bubble Wrap Show". The gallery windows were lined with the packing material to protect the sensibilities of unsuspecting passers-by.

Knowledgeable, playful, and committed - collector, educator, curator, yearling gallery owner and arts agent provocateur, Mindy Solomon's show deconstructs, questions and encourages dialogue about gender and identity.

J.Aiden Simon addresses this issue from intimate personal experience as a transgendered individual. There are several self-portraits of Aiden, some taken when 14 yrs old - introspective, tense, exquisite small black and white prints. It is refreshing to see a small print nowadays. There are larger ones in color, fictional documentary images that look like stages in the gender transition, but aren't, deconstructing the process, and making referential commentary about the medium's perceived veracity.

 Becky Flander's large self-portraits, masked/anonymized, nude, holding her labia open, and uninating "like a man" while standing in sylvan cypress-swamp settings,  unsettled, if not shocked, some opening-night gallery goers, and I suspect are the main reason for the bubble wrap. It's not just the exposed genitalia, the signal orange masks or nudity. It's the shock of seeing a taken-for-granted gender signifier unmasked.

Sean Fader, educated as an actor, put this experience to good use, questioning gender, identity, and the relationship between portraiture and self-portraiture. He photographs people, both men and women he knows, though in this show only women are shown, in poses that have referents in art history, and nude. Then he assumes the same pose and having studied the subject, acts like them, and when the subject (and the word gets indistinct and mystifyingly fuzzy in these pictures) thinks he looks like them, a 2nd picture is made. Sean later digitally replaces the original subject's head with his, and emphasizes this by inserting a zipper along the seam. The old question about the portraits being about the photographer resonates in Sean's work.

  There are many other artists and media in this not-to-be-missed show. Misty Gamble's tense, yet whimsical gestural sculptures. Connie Imboden's haunting, lyrically beautiful inquiries into the human form. Anne Drew Potter, a poetess in body-language through her ceramic sculptures. Bonnie Seeman's richly textured and colored, rivetingly engaging, elegiac, organically frank pottery is a feast for the senses and effortlessly transcends its functional form. Last, but not least, Toni Billick's humorously raunchy Sheepy Gone Wild, which was hung in the bathroom, and the performance/character of Sheepy Bo Peep, who is simultaneously sheep and shepherdess, made a memorable appearance at the opening.


    Don't mistake the bubble wrap as insulation between this show and the community. It's more of a metaphor of the relationship between truths and their veils -- and fills the gallery with beautifully diffused light.

--- Luis

Ps.  Mindy Solomon's Undressing the Feminine show opened July 3rd, and closes in about a week, on August 14. See it at 124 2nd Ave. NE St Petersburg, Wed-Sat, 11am to 5pm.