Henry Art Gallery, 543-2280.
Through Nov 10.
Ballard Fetherston Gallery, 322-9440.
Through Aug 31.
I have a postcard taped over my desk with an image from Elizabeth Jameson's 1999 performance in Vienna, You Are Not Welcome Here. In it, the artist, dressed in sober black, walks through a crowd of people, the city's famously ornate cathedral in the background. You can somehow tell that she's walking slowly, deliberately, and she seems very small indeed. What's odd about the image takes a moment to register: The long, long sleeves of Jameson's dress drag behind her, and the crowd parts like the Red Sea, moving aside to let her pass.
These sleeves are, in fact, 40 feet long, and trail far out of the photograph's frame; one can well imagine the reaction of polite Vienna society, waiting for this strange, small woman to move out of earshot before the Saxon commentary begins. Embedded in this work are issues of fitting in and standing out, of normalcy and choices, of deep-seated societal reaction (Jameson repeated the performance in San Francisco, where, she says, she was received like a circus performer). I never tire of looking at this photo. It reminds me why strangeness is an attractive choice.
Jameson's non-performance work of the past few years, much of which is installed (along with a videotape of the Vienna performance, and the famous dress) in two Elizabeth-Arden-pink galleries at the Henry, has focused these issues almost exclusively through the medium of clothing, and they are by turns charming and frightening--most of them drawings of outfits that compromise both wearer and viewer, with eerie hoods that could be either protective (as in hazardous-materials coveralls) or identity- shielding (as in the Klan).
Some of the clothing's details explore the difficulty of wearing (tubes for breathing in full-coverage outfits, stairs for climbing a voluminous skirt), and others create clothes that are impossible, not to say impractical (a sweater with arms that join, a series of bustles that bind the body starting at the feet). These drawings are imbued with a feeling of secrecy and danger; a long, horizontal piece shows what looks like an 18th-century court dress that extends ridiculously to the sides, giving the outfit the look of a proscenium arch (as if clothes weren't so patently about costuming in their everyday manifestation), and the figure's featureless head has a black square over what might be her face, like the identity-hiding techniques used on news programs to protect the innocent. Jameson's figures are never so much individuals as they are inhabitants.
The centerpiece of the Henry show is a new work, a room-length sculpture of the cage (called, appropriately enough, a pannier) that would go under one of those exaggerated court dresses, constructed almost entirely out of rock sugar and lit from within. Here Jameson shifts her emphasis from the covering to the scaffolding, and her work has been cleverly contrasted with holdings from the Henry's textile collection--in this case, a couple of bullet-shaped bras from the '50s, plus a handful of corsets, merry widows, and bustle cages--that give it historical context. This deep reach into the past may very well create the temptation to cleave to some obvious polemic--that women suffer at the hands of trends and designers--but Jameson sidesteps this trap because she is open to the seduction of fashion.
The work asks a question about where necessity ends and frivolousness begins, but refuses to answer it; the answer is too easy, and not quite truthful, anyway. Like Nicola Vruwink, another local lady-artist, Jameson transforms the political problem partly by identifying with it, partly by wresting the terms of the argument away from cliché. Sweetness is not sweet, nor is it something determined by feminists or designers or historians. Sweetness is up for grabs.
(On a side note, I was apparently so seduced by a rock-sugar sculpture of Jameson's a few years ago that during the opening reception I snuck around to the back of the piece, which was called Sweet Fear, and licked it. I got a tongue full of chemicals and glue. I do not recommend licking. Neither does the Henry.)
