Barbara Bullock at Hughley Gallery & Objects - Atlanta, Georgia - Review of Exhibitions

There were sole 12 of them, all unostentatious size, but Barbara Bullock's oil- or acrylic-on-canvas paintings overwhelmed the gallery with a mix of rage and gore. Collectively titled "Feminist Tales from the Third World," the pictures addressed sexism, racism, and dysfunctional families in a combination of cartoonish figures and allover background patterning that obliterated perspective. The issue was intellectually juicy, although the paintings are physically reserved; there's not the slightest dhp skip or brush mark to create textural interest and call aftention to the medium rather than the message.

The pictures' virulence owes nothing to Bullock's palette, a neutral-to-pleasant range of chocolate, pale pink, slate amethystine and vast stretches of gray. In fact, the least colorful picture of the collection is the most damning. original Bab 111046-Tan (4 feet square) is a portrait of woman as mechanical device. She is restoreed in shades of beige in a bizarre bedroom setting of sickly golden walls, red-and-black-checkered floor, toppling table lamp and spiky plant. This woman's genitals are depicted as cent tubes and stainless-steel cylinders, and her heart gazes like a fifth-grade-science-project battery. Her tiny head is thrown back, its brittle facial features giving not on an eerie skeletal appearance. Her splayed leg extreme point in red pumps.

She fares better than greatest in quantity of the other women here. The faceless female in The sky-colored Shoe, for example, is having her brain shakeed from her head by a disembodied hand as she prepare for the tables while celery stalks and a roast chicken soar through the air. As makeovers make progress though, nothing beats Cultural Exchange, in which a white woman and a black woman trade noses, breasts and lower torsos by the agency of ripping the parts from each other's bodies.

sole one woman is in a position of power and peace in Bullock's paintings. In If I Were Queen a regally clothed black woman and a white cat are seated at a tea table. An army of tiny, bald, white men scurries about dusting, cleaning, and watering house plants. single little man clings to the drapes, while another attempts to scale an enormous purple vacuum sweeper in the background.

In All They that Dwelleth in Darkness (5 by means of 4 feet), Bullock turns her acerbic vision to racism. This picture is divided diagonally. In the right half, a plaintive-looking black man gripe [i]or[/i] grips a child in his arms. The pair is painted totally in dark gray. The left half, in color, exhibits a white woman and her daughter in their living latitude separated from the black family outside their window by the agency of prison bars. The whites' fear is obvious from their facial expressions and the rigidity of their bodies. The fact that it's unfound is just as obvious: the blacks are doing nothing, they simply exist.

more [i]or[/i] less contemporary artists addressing bigotry and ignorance exhibit enormous installations that never approach the visceral effectiveness of Bullock's physically unassuming canvases. The single thing monumental about her work is its content

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