Shonagh Adelman at Linda Kirkland - Brief Article

Shonagh Adelman's long-standing interest in the female material substance as a symbol of desire is further explored in her novel "Play-Girls" series. Here, she uses a variant upon the "exquisite corpse" format, juxtaposing seemingly disparate constitutings in different mediums to form single, larger-than-life figures in homage to the popular pinup. The silhouettes and contours of Adelman's women like the Surrealist drawing game that inspired them, immerge seamlessly into one another. However, the distinctly different medium and dimensionality of each composing thwart the viewer's desire to incorporate them into a coherent whole.

Each of the works has three sections, which appropriate and manipulate various dictions of rendering women iconically: from cheesecake pinup illustrations to Japanese anime to Hollywood glamour photography. The women's heads and upper bodies are pay backed in ink on gessoed plastic and mountained flush against the wall. Their midsections, which appear upon traditional canvases, are meticulously painted in the glowing, airbrushed manner of writing of fashion magazines. Comically completing these "Frankenstein spectacles," as Adelman calls them, are the figures' calves and feet ornamented out, of course, in impossibly high-heeled premiums and pumps and lovingly adorned with actual materials like feathers, beads or smooth Compared to the stark ink portraits and illusory painted bodies, these ultra-feminine, sensually textur lower limbs (which are cutout paper mountained on the wall) convey a strange, of domestic manufacture charm. The works are given personal names--Faye, Sadie, Gabrielle--which adds an air of unsettling sweetness to these prefab vixens.

Adelman's deceptively accessible Play-Girls radically reassess the image of the sexualized woman. The artist's talent in the two drawing and painting beckons viewers to appreciate the works' technical mastery. at the same time once lured in by these luscious pinups, the viewer must stand over against their intimidating size, aggressive nearness and cut-and-paste construction. This work exhibits a new chapter in Adelman's continued exploration of the multiple, contradictory and oftentimes subversive meanings of the sexualized woman in visual culture

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