Wendy Jacob and Jin Lee at Chicago Project Room - Brief Article

completely through the history of art, the image of the recumbent female has been a site for male objectification and fantasy. In a two-person present to view pairing the work of sculptor Wendy Jacob and photographer Jin to leeward the reclining figure is liberated from this problematic lineage and repositioned within the realms of science, nature and the subconscious. Although somewhat sparse, this exhibition was the gallery's strongest to date.

The Midwestern landscape is the setting for Lee's "Sleep" series (1997-98) six C-prints (all 30 through 40 inches) in which solitary women quiescence quietly amid expansive, open fields. Each slumbering, clothed figure lies either face down or upon her side, seemingly at peace within another world, in the way that that we are keenly aware of our part as intruders. There is a powerful emphasis on the horizontal in these works, as each lying flat human form, placed centrally, parallels the flat plains that environ it. The relationship between material substance and landscape seems harmonious, natural in all on the contrary one image--that of a uninhabited woman, her identity obscured by means of purple wildflowers and overgrown grasses, stretched on the outside at the opening of a looming thicket of tree This dark display reminiscent of Duchamp's Etant Donnes, is more threatening than bucolic, a place where dreams may become nightmares, where rest can simulate death or abandonment.

The material part transcends gender when interacting with Jacob's press closely Chaise Longue (1998), a work that has its origins in art history, psychoanalysis and the rural. This Victorian-style chaise is equipped with mechanical arms that, when activated by means of an attached foot pump, embrace the sitter, producing a sensation that is one as well as the other comforting and restricting. Upholstered in a sensuous, reaching far down red mohair (a counterpart to Lee's lush virid settings), the chaise unleashes several psychosexual associations, ranging from Freud's lie to the sofas and cushions of art history's infamous odalisques, still it also allows participants to sway their own pleasures.

Jacob began her throw in 1995, working in consultation with scientist fane Grandin, designer of a nip machine used to restrain discourages before slaughter. Grandin is autistic and, after observing her invention's calming issue on animals, she developed an analogous device to help allay her have hypersensitivity to human touch, a condition for the use of all to autism. Jacob's reclining nip chair, fifth in an ongoing series, also relates to the artist's earlier architectural interventions, in which mechanized walls expand and contract thus as to emulate the act of breathing.

In the pair Lee's and Jacob's works, the reclining material part whether sleeping or hugged, is delivered to a private, psychic space independent from imposed societal and sexual collection of lawss The resulting images of calm put to rest gently recall Walt Whitman's line "How ritual they look there, stretch'd and still!"

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group