Year of the woman

Shirin Neshat, “Faezeh & Amir Kahn,” 2008

Year of the woman

A trio of female artists ushers in 2008

By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

It’s no secret that women are underrepresented in most professional endeavors. Approximately 17 percent of our political representatives are female — roughly the same percentage of women who are in galleries. January’s artistic offerings give hope that the situation will improve in the coming year.

Shirin Neshat continues to take on cultural values in her new show at Gladstone gallery. Iranian born and Western educated, Neshat confronts tradition and finds a way through the landmines separating self from society. Known for film and video, her signature motif is the use of Persian calligraphy to cover her own body, her subjects or backgrounds.

After moving to the United States in 1974, Neshat worked at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Soho. She began to take photographs and make videos that addressed dualities in society, such as East/West, male/female, eroticism/repression, political/personal and oppressor/oppressed. She has polished that theme of duality until it shines. Using haunting panoramas and transcendent scores, the images admit the possibility of a fusion between opposites.

Neshat’s vision is important and her projects have been well received. Early on, she began using simultaneous video projections to amplify the dualities. RoseLee Goldberg, the maven of Performa, produced one of her films in 2001 and it premiered at Lincoln Center as part of a multi-disciplinary production the next year.

Currently, Neshat continues her long-term depiction of Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel “Women Without Men,” which focuses on the pivotal moment in 1953 when the CIA reinstalled the Shah of Iran.

The tale tracks five Iranian women struggling to assert their identity in the face of cruel domination. The protagonists offer a metaphorical comparison with the country of Iran, which is also struggling to maintain independence from foreign control. Neshat’s venture includes a full-length feature film.

Neshat’s third show at Gladstone features new video installations and photographs that explore two of the women, Munis and Faezeh. Socially committed, Munis witnesses the death of a political activist, then takes her own life. In death she begins a magical communion with the activist.

Faezeh’s circumstances are even more grim. Her world is destroyed by rape. Again the character seeks solace in magic as she enters an enchanted garden. However, madness ensues in the breakdown of conviction.

Neshat does not rely on irony or satire in her remarkable portrayals of the desires of life. She translates vulnerability into courage and suffering into nobility.

Finding purity in a medium isn’t easy. Working with organic shapes in matte colors, Carolanna Parlato approaches a clarity that feels complete. Her new show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery presents a bold and playful reinterpretation of color field painting. The works are self-possessed and assertive despite their inscrutable whimsy.

A hint of narrative is given in the title “The Kiss.” A white nipple protrudes horizontally into a vertical brown vessel, which partially covers a rough ellipse. A red background adds tension to the floating forms. Drip marks run in three directions balancing the solidity with delicacy.

“Meeting Time” (which hints at Dali’s melting watches) admits one straight line: an orange bar dissecting a cheery blue. Two shades of lavender, parrot green, mustard and red march across the canvas. Thick wavy tails of drip marks dip down like tendrils, giving further life to the buoyant forms.

Parlato has honed her vocabulary until it can speak for itself and therein lies her purity of expression.

Finding purity in grids of cutout squares, Ga Hae Park creates visual poems or scores that resemble musical notation. Beneath a grid of squares is another grid of squares and then another. Sometimes Park leaves the paper partially intact. The results can read like an advent calendar in which each window opens to reveal a picture inside, or a row of cannons on an old ship with their flaps pulled up to fire. Colors or dots peek out from under.

“Time in Blue” is a quilt of blues, pinks and white. Inside the innermost recession (or third square down) may be a dark dot. Each tiny square can become a miniature painting in itself. A white dot on a blue sky creates vast distance.

A line across a circle becomes a horizon over a lake at sundown. The artist’s skill in minute repetition recalls the sublime work of Agnes Martin.

Drawing inspiration from nature, titles like “Rain,” “Sunflower,” and “Time Flower” add illustration to the rhythms. Park often works in a series. Her “Space Drawings” is made up of 18 pieces. “Music Drawing—The Well Tempered Clavier, Prelude 1, C Major” is 24 pieces presented in two rows. Vertical lines resemble piano keys or digital displays of musical information. Park demonstrates the ability to evoke the most complex systems using the simplest and purist means.