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Untitled: Lisa Solomon's wax-dipped baby dress. Pretty Empty Hand Made at the Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery through Oct. 27. By Rachel Goodwin Lisa Solomon's fashionable artwork at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery carries with it a nostalgia for girliness as well as an overall acceptance of the domesticity of women. The oil and mixed media collages on canvas employ Vogue sewing patterns, black drippy linoleum prints of irons and clothespins, fields of subtle shades of yellow, white, and an occasional red, and images of dress forms: some thickly painted, others simply drawn. It seems Solomon missed the feminist movement altogether. Instead of allowing her work to use domestic objects as ironic or kitch, she embraces their prettiness and misses the inherent pain and constraint they have imposed upon women for decades. There are two sculpture/found object pieces in the show. The first is a series of untitled baby dresses dipped in wax and hung on hangers. The second is a small pile of tiny white female wax torsos. While the torsos, placed on a pedestal in the corner, don't seem integral to the show, the dresses consume the gallery's back wall. But rather than conveying the artist's intention of sealing little girlhood forever in wax, they juxtapose the idea of little girls dressed in lace and flowers with hot wax in a unintentionally disturbing and creepy way. The large amount of wax used sits heavily on the light, frilly dresses. Formally, the most successful tool Solomon uses in her paintings is the linoleum print. The dripping prints of irons and clothespins add a raw, almost bloody quality to the otherwise too-easy-to-digest paintings. However, she uses the image of an iron's bottom, which we see most commonly when an iron has burned something, to create more benign images -- pinwheels and flowers. Again prettiness is heralded above meaning or reality. Each painting matches the next as if they were pieces of clothing instead of paintings. Not surprising coming from a costume designer, but perhaps that's the problem with this show. More power to prettiness, but not without focused intent. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]