It's debatable whether Blondes Have More Fun, as painter Carrie Jenkins has titled her show at Dust Gallery, but it's pretty clear she's been having some.
Jenkins has been funnin' with fashion for some time now, painting wispy female figures in stylish getups, and her paintings seem at once to celebrate fashion and hold suspect its sway. Her paintings have the "we're here, we're dear, get over it" aspect of a Sex and the City episode, but their hard-edged style and the interchangeable blankness of the figures tend to prompt questions, too.
The work at Dust certainly raises questions, such as, "Why would a woman go fishing in heels?" and "Wherever did you find that darling shotgun?" Painting in thin acrylic on Arches watercolor paper, Jenkins closely approximates the willowy flair of newspaper fashion-ad sketches of earlier decades—which, presumably, were meant to cue women to the flighty lines they would cut through space, clad in the latest from Sax or Bergdorf's. The lines of Jenkins' figures trail away with abandon, with filaments of hair flung about like reeds of overgrown Bermuda grass. But they tote fishing poles and firearms as if they'd just fled the runway for some rural recreation.
In some cases, such as "I Wish," whose skirted and pointy-shoed gamin reclines with a fishing pole like Huck Finn, this conceit is simply amusing. But in other compositions, it's disturbing. For instance, a spectral fawn confronts its chic huntress in "Ghost," perhaps to infer parallels between the empty amusements of shopping and shooting, with stenciled, burgundy flowers bleeding paint. In others, such as "Night Crawler" and "Precious," the light lines defining a dress sweep outward into vigorous, almost angry, gestural blocks of no representational significance.
For the most part, Jenkins handles the diluted paint expertly, as washes of varying intensity shape and shade forms. But sometimes, as in "Pole Dancer 1," the paint-handling seems less assured, even clunky. "Hill Country Story (Blondes Have More Fun)" reads like a paperback-cover illustration, with pole- and gun-toting figures, a cabin in the woods and a large face overlooking the mélange, but "Rock Star" just seems overly busy and confused.
Several of Jenkins' canvas paintings, including the clever "Zits," hang in the rear of the gallery, but clearly the unframed paintings on paper are the focus. Jenkins is onto something with the watercolor-like approach, and you have to imagine she will refine it.
The Contemporary Arts Collective's annual Members Show is an inchoate affair, even more so than you'd expect of such a grab bag. Christopher Tsouras of the Fine Arts Gallery at CCSN selected 31 pieces from 186 entries, but a lot of the work will seem familiar, in a usual-suspects way, to most regular gallery-goers.
Photography is the highlight here, from Darius Kuzmickas' familiar but still spooky pinhole camera images to Diane Bush's volatile "Graffiti Seen (2005) ‘The Worst War Crime Is Starting One,'" a distorted video image with fiery streaks and spatters. Haya Gil-Lubin's "photograms" are similarly uncanny: complex amalgams of peculiar forms.
Jack Endewelt's work always engages the viewer, and "Vulnerability Series: Female Target with Heart," an oil-on-linen, is no exception. A faint, dreamlike woman's face seems to float above a firing-range target torso, with an anatomical heart visible. The work invokes the "real" target implied by the paper version, but it also hints at the general vulnerability of the human being.
Expressing vulnerability in another way is Victor Laurean's "Resurecsion," a narrow, vertical composition in the expressionist vein. A prone figure seems to exchange one mask for another, which could express a certain triumph, too.