In grade school, it's usually pretty easy to figure out who has cooties. Gender is as readily understood as the stick figures on the bathroom doors--one's wearing a triangular skirt, one's not. Assign cooties accordingly. You know who belongs on your team for girls-against-boys dodge ball. You know whose hair you want to pull.
But maybe you're not so sure about the pigtailed tomboy who brings action figures to recess, or the boy who carries his books in a purple backpack. Maybe you're constantly exposed to magazines, TV commercials, and advertisements that manage to simultaneously glorify waifish femininity, beefy masculinity, androgyny, and drag. Maybe you saw RuPaul on prime time and you're more than a little confused.
Sugar and Snails is the Park School Gallery's artistic answer to the conflicting messages about gender, sexuality, and the human body that permeate the media and our everyday lives. The show is co-curated by Peter Bruun, the Park School's exhibitions educator, and Laura Burns, a photographer and art professor at Goucher College (where the author of this article is a media relations coordinator), and inside, you'll find work by some of their favorites--Matthew McConville, Albert Schweitzer, John Coplans, Catherine Opie, Samantha Salzinger, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee--a group of artists known for creating no-holds-barred images of the human body, in various stages of undress and duress. You'll also find the gallery blinds drawn shut, and a notice on the door explaining which students are allowed to see the work, and when, and who with. All this extra security is a necessity in a school that serves a pre-kindergarten through 12th grade age bracket, but it's also a fitting layer of subtext for the entire show, which takes a head-on look at gender images that society isn't necessarily comfortable with--serious realities kept behind closed doors, and out of glossy fashion magazines.
Sugar and Snails begins fairly tamely, with a selection of point-and-shoot self-portraits by Korean-born photographer Nikki S. Lee. Lee deals with gender identity by reinventing her own body through "projects," self-assigned street photography/performance art experiments that involve changing her clothes, hair, attitude, setting, and the company she keeps--in effect, becoming a brand-new version of herself and blending seamlessly into various subcultures.
"Punk Project 6" is reminiscent of Shoichi Aoki's Fruits photographs, which document DIY fashion on the streets of Tokyo. Here, Lee pouts through a mop of electric pink hair, her face studded with clip-on body jewelry. "School Girls Project 3" transforms Lee into a Korean schoolgirl, uniformed, apple-cheeked, and indistinguishable from the real-life schoolgirls who surround her. Constantly changing, but undeniably female, Lee presents a chameleonic view of womanhood--a "we girls can do anything" aesthetic far more powerful than anything Barbie ever accomplished.
Photographer Samantha Salzinger covers flesh-and-blood models with mannequin-like masks to subvert a few traditional female dress-up roles. The glassy-eyed, plasticine stares of her "Modern Bride" and "School Portrait" are reminiscent of inflatable sex dolls, or, again, Barbie--providing provocative interpretations for children and adults alike. Salzinger's other displayed works ("Head Wrap" and "Stitches") are particularly rare fare for a school gallery--graphic images of post-op plastic surgery patients. They're meant to explore the notion of prettiness and femininity in modern society, but there simply aren't enough context clues here to let the images rise above disturbing sensationalism--they feel unnervingly out of place.
Of course, Sugar and Snails isn't all about the ladies. The exhibit also features Matthew McConville's weirdly charming images of pudgy middle-aged men frolicking--yes, frolicking--amid pastoral woodland scenes, baring their beer bellies and flaccid members with almost classical abandon. An untitled series of 14 interrelated oil-on-canvas panels shows McConville's nude man tribe scrabbling around in the dirt, riding piggyback on one another, and performing sports-like behaviors. Only one figure seems uncomfortable with his nudity, hiding his genitalia behind folded hands. It's like a kinder, gentler, flabbier version of Lord of the Flies.
The late John Coplans uses his body to similar effect in two unusual black-and-white photographic works that challenge traditional images of the male form. "Self Portrait (Reclining Figure, Two Panels, No. 1)" presents Coplans' naked, hairy body in larger-than-life detail, his hands folded demurely across his genitals. Coplans' pose simultaneously evokes cheesecake pinup posters, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and modern magazine ads, placing his body in a category usually occupied by young, buxom women. At first glance, "Untitled III (Self Portrait)" is a confusing image--a weird slit of skin and hair, pulled apart by Coplans' fingers. Upon closer examination, you realize that you're seeing the man's scrotum stretched out like rubber, and the photograph takes on a childlike tone, more innocent self-exploration than gratuitous self-exposure.
The accompanying collection of gender-related work by Park School students is also worth a look, as well as a display by Park human sexuality educator Debbie Roffman, designed to rework the stereotypes and subliminal sexual messages inherent in popular culture. While the gallery artists riff on androgyny and sexuality, Roffman encourages viewers to "play with the gender" in ads for everything from Versace to milk. For the most part, Burns and Bruun successfully maintain this playful tone throughout Sugar and Snails, although the show would have benefited from the same level of context-setting and labeling used in past Park School exhibitions. Still, the intended message comes through loud and clear: Gender, with all its accompanying social customs, stereotypes, and physical expectations, is a lot more complicated and confusing than those bathroom door stick figures would have you believe.
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