Friday, October 27, 2006

Knockout work by a trio of young artists

By REGINA HACKETT
P-I ART CRITIC

Oh brave new world, that has such images in it: Kerry Skarbakka diving and falling, Liz Cohen mocking sexism and auto shops, and Susie Lee exploring a trace world of repressed feelings.

		ART REVIEW
	KERRY SKARBAKKA, LIZ COHEN AND SUSIE LEE WHERE: Lawrimore Project, 831 Airport Way S. WHEN: Through Nov. 11. Hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Skarbakka's photos provide a dramatic adventure in the main gallery at Lawrimore Project, as well as in the gallery adjacent to the office. Lee is in the video room, and Cohen's large prints are in the back, where, at the opening, they drew the most traffic.

She's the art world's Clark Kent. By day, she's a modest young art type, dressed in jeans and sweat shirts. With no makeup, she's appealing in a kid sister vein. As the star of her photos, however, she's a super glam great body, a siren sibling of the gamey pinups that commonly covered the walls of auto shops, at least until women started taking their cars in for service, otherwise known as the feminist revolution.

Is Cohen exploiting herself? Hell, yes, and absolutely not. The fact that she can transform her wholesome good looks into heat means she could pass muster in the high-end porn world. As an artist, however, she codes that desirability as a joke.

It's a move we've seen before. Remember the young Madonna sporting a belt with a "boy toy" logo? In the early 1980s, it meant a master of pop culture was toying with us. Madonna assumed that feminists had won, and their "respect yourself" message was a given, making it fair game for contrarian comedy.

A quarter of a century later, Cohen knows that nothing about feminism is a given, at least as long as succeeding generations perceive it as waging war on hard-wired sexual instinct. Nobody likes a killjoy.

Cohen's large color photos are a kind of theoretical roots music. The car she's crawling all over is an Eastern European model which she, wrench in hand, refitted with a new engine. It looks terrible but runs smoothly. The reverse is true of sexual exploitation. It looks good but runs badly, confining those who live by it to the shallows. On the other hand, shallows are fun. Cohen's images play with the meanings they evoke, entertaining with a barbed hook. In the end, the wise must bow to the beautiful, even when the beautiful are slumming.