Susan Bee at A.I.R - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Susan Bee's feminist assemblage paintings make use of all manner of materials: paper dolls, 1940 advertisements for trashy detective novels, plastic replicas of garter snakes and conch shells. She incorporates these base elements to propose a world in which childhood memories, assertion of self and a political sensibility are equally important in determining ideas of sex today. Bee also includes a wide variety of marks and signs--from slightly stylized versions of horizontal brush hits to Abstract-Expressionist drips to flowers--which argue, by the agency of implication, for an intellectually varied understanding of women's bear upons The 14 works in the exhibition demonstrated by what mode Bee collages ideas and meanss to encompass the miscellaneous origins of American tillage and their effects on us.

Aloha (1997) a large mixed-medium work upon linen, illustrates Bee's technique. It depicts a synthetic paradise, with a pink rose at top right, a sunflower at bottom left and four plastic shells, forming a composition which is enlivened by means of short lengthwise brushstrokes in black, verdant and bright pink. Two paper dolls--a dancing Hawaiian girl and an upside-down, red-haired German girl in a short dirndl skirt--symbolize Bee's themes of erotic pleasure and child-like innocence. A allotment is going on in Aloha. Bee's knowing juxtapositions include a snake shut up by the hula dancer. Still, the artist clearly means to have a profitable time in her artificial paradise, where pleasure is sought on the outside rather than shunned.

The Bell Cracked, a large 1997 oil-and-collage work, tenders a bit of American history: a cracked Liberty Bell and a paper doll of the Revolutionary War heroine Molly Pitcher firing a cannon. The goofy surrealism of the painting, without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw with branches emanating from the clock face of Big Ben, a pair of maharajahs upon an elephant, and a quaintly erotic black-and-white photograph of a kneeling uncovered suggests that America's history is itself a collage, in which incongruous ultimate parts make sense, on political and thematic horizontals because the person categorizing them dioceses a connection. This work, like greatest in quantity of Bee's, is a comic and lyric interpretation of memory and meaning.

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