California photographer Kenna Love began exploring the visual possibilities of interweaving artists and their art in portraits taken for a magazine assignment on Los Angeles women artists.
The project grew into an odyssey and the companion exhibit and book,
”Exposures, Women & Their Art” (New Sage Press, $24.95 softcover). Love teamed up with art historians Betty Ann Brown in Los Angeles and Arlene Raven in New York, who wrote the text for the book, to select the artists Love photographed from across the country.
The exhibit, which opens Friday at the Sazama Gallery, 300 W. Superior St., celebrates diversity in the visual arts and the spirit of creativity with a selection of Love`s portraits, including those of Chicago artists Phyllis Bramson, Susanna Coffey, Michiko Itatani, Hollis Sigler, Bibiana Suarez and Margaret Wharton.
In many of these portraits, the artists meld with their work so they are of it in a way that throws a poignant light on art as an expression of an artist`s inner world.
Brown and Raven give further expression to this inner world, quoting from interviews with each of the 50 artists in eloquent verbal portraits that accompany the photographs in the book.
The women artists represented in the show come from varying backgrounds, live from coast to coast, work in a cross-section of mediums and differ in age and philosophy. But the exhibit, by its very title, inevitably raises questions about whether there is a women`s art, distinct from men`s art, and whether there is a women`s vision.
”I`m one who says `yes` and `no,` ” says painter Phyllis Bramson. ”I like to think a good artist who`s a woman will have a vision that`s really her own and will maybe take on issues men won`t. But we don`t want to be women first and artists second.”
Bramson`s vibrant, kaleidoscopic paintings draw the viewer into surreal worlds that reflect dysfunction in society and relationships. Bramson says her 1988 portrait, included in ”Exposures,” caught her ”mid-stream” in her work. The paintings surrounding her in the portrait suggest a volatile terrain of male and female relationships.
Since then, Bramson`s paintings have become charged with imagery that explores similarities in societal attitudes toward nature and toward women.
Itatani inhabits her multiple-exposure portrait as a sort of animating spirit absorbed into a fragmented cosmology of paintings that bring the viewer to a new perspective about the assumptions built into everyday experience.
”I look at things as they are and try not to forcibly make sense of them by filling in the gaps I don`t know,” says Itatani. ”It`s respect for what I don`t know. It`s kind of like Oriental philosophy.”
She grew up in Japan and moved to Chicago when she was 20. ”I think any artwork reflects what the artist is and being a woman is certainly a part of me,” she says. But as for a women`s vision of art, ”that`s a forced issue for me. If I`m a woman, I`m a woman. We`re living in different times than the `70s.”
The installation of paintings in her portrait suggests archeological fragments of a sweeping and richly detailed epic. Yet her figures are universals, with traits such as gender or race left intentionally ambiguous. She is painting now on wall-sized canvases, but she still depicts a fragmented cosmos within each piece.
”It`s about how difficult it is to live harmoniously among human beings. It`s workable and we have the desire to work it out, but sometimes it looks like an unattainable desire,” she says. (”Locations of Desire,” an exhibit opening Tuesday at the State of Illinois Art Gallery, State of Illinois Center, 100 W. Randolph St., features Bramson`s and Itatani`s work as well as Vera Klement`s in a three-person show through July 13.)
Love followed her own creative intuition in generating portraits that show the essentially invisible symbiosis between artist and art. One of her earliest subjects, Los Angeles painter Ruth Weisberg, saturates her pictures with a lyrical sense of motion. Weisberg runs through the portrait Love took of her, a translucent figure who appears to be leaping from one of her own canvases.
”I wanted to present her the way she was painting,” Love says.
”Through that experience, I realized if I could open up and be sensitive to an artist`s surroundings, I could relate her to her work.” She notes she tried to make each portrait a collaboration with the artist.
”For a majority of the artists in this book, the experience-directly or indirectly-of the women`s movement and the Women`s Art Movement gave them the approval to merge their personal lives with their public and artistic selves,” Brown and Raven state in the introduction to the book. On the other hand, they write of the artists, ”Their powerful visions merge with master/
mistress accomplishments of form. Their visions span what it means to be an individual in society, a political animal in a material world, a spiritual being in corporeal form.”
Ultimately, the exhibit suggests how art-born of an artist`s personal history-transcends the individual to generate a universal narrative about life.
Love and several of the Chicago artists whose portraits are in the exhibit are scheduled to attend an opening reception at the Sazama Gallery, 5:30-8 p.m. Friday. Love will present a multi-media slide show of the photographs from the book at the opening. The exhibit runs through June 30. Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
