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Simone Shubuck's Wup-less series displays women's lingerie fabricated from food. Dressed Up With Nowhere to Go That Girl! at the Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery through December 22 By Aimee Le Duc Some mornings, putting on my clothes is the most defiant act I'll do all day. Sometimes, a hem of a skirt hitting the back of my thighs says more about me than anything I could say in 24 hours combined. This shouldn't be true, but it is. When can I express myself without it being an expression of femininity? When will we no longer need gender-inspired art exhibitions to expose the irony of not only today's sexism but also today's market driven girl power? When will getting dressed also not require the pulling on the cold wet suit of identity? Five artists have been collected to answer these exhausting questions of feminism with humor, irony, detailed craft, and intelligence. The exhibit, That Girl!, at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery is dressed with polished -- albeit not entirely original -- work by Katherine Aoki, Jungsun Kim, Stella Lai, Simone Shubuck, and Lisa Solomon. These women are emerging artists in their fields who incorporate design, craft, and mixed-media art practices in their interpretations of the imagery of women as it is worn by many of us today. Shubuck's assemblages reveal meticulously positioned note cards and souvenirs among delicate, rotting, tantalizing panties made from thinly sliced tomatoes arranged in handmade shopping carts. She plays on the familiar clichés of shopping, food preparation, and sentimentality as signifiers of femininity. Her pieces are interesting and fun to inspect, though not unusual enough to alter a perspective. Alameda-based artist Aoki's drawings exist on multiple levels. She exposes the emptiness of many "girl power" marketing ploys by depicting anime girls running construction sites for gigantic shoes. In other drawings, these girl workers operate cranes decorated with flowers and hearts. Aoki's work is funny, dark, silly, and brutally accurate at the same time. Her narrative images don't tell us anything we didn't know before, but they do describe in an attractive and clever manner. The most striking piece in the exhibition comes from Kim. This Korean-based artist plays off Korean film imagery and stereotypes. Her piece is a series of photo-transfer graphite drawings of women's faces displayed in a grid form. The faces are difficult to see right away; their expressions aren't easily defined or clear. Kim's work pushed me to think about how women are seen and not seen, about how quickly we dismiss each other because we are too difficult to really see. Overall, That Girl! is highly accessible and right on the money. It's an opportunity to visually absorb some of the major challenges for women and how we represent ourselves. However, none of the work effectively confronts these challenges or changed my perspective. The work on display is a collection of attractive commodities that both implicate and defend women in our participation in both sexism and feminism. That Girl! is an exhibit worth trying on, but not precious enough to take away and wear into the future. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]