In Becky Flanders’ mind, she doesn’t make work about sex.
“I make work about gender,” she says.
As we nosh at a Temple Terrace deli, the Tampa artist explains how her work wound up in an exhibition titled Post Coital, which is avowedly about sex, at a St. Petersburg gallery. Flanders has found the difference between the two — sex and gender — to be a slippery one. Several years ago, while she was still a graduate student in USF’s MFA program, she began making photographs of a costumed woman (herself) urinating while standing up and explicit, medical manual-like pictures of female genitalia that diagrammed the process.
Rife with exposed labia and the sadistic eroticism of pissing on things, Flanders’ earlier work arguably positioned itself within spitting distance of sex without taking on the act itself.
Her latest work comes closer. On view at Mindy Solomon Gallery through March, four of her drawings pay homage to silphium, a now-extinct plant once important enough to ancient Libyans that it decorated their coins. According to historical accounts, ingesting the plant as tea may have allowed women to prevent becoming pregnant. Flanders’ pale drawings — made by staining white paper with tea — of silphium in seed and mature plant states invoke the ancient icon to prompt reconsideration of contemporary assumptions.
“To the progressive liberal imagination, we have this idea that feminism is a new thing,” she says. “There have been thousands of different methods of birth control over the history of humanity.”
At MSG, Flanders’ drawings join photographs and sculptures by six other artists who, in various ways, entertain questions in and around the erogenous zones. Since Solomon opened her gallery in 2010, such sex shows have become her forte, showing off the gallery owner’s intellectual and aesthetic attitudes — from deeply serious to irreverently provocative — toward the topic. Past installments have been so racy as to necessitate covering the gallery windows with bubble wrap and issuing viewer advisories.
Post Coital requires less caution. For the most part, works in the exhibition explore sex as an ambiguous, even indecipherable, state of affairs where social norms, personal expectations and corporeal boundaries break down, rather than as a clear proposition.
Christina West’s sculptures are a good example. In one piece, she positions two nude ceramic figures — one male, one female, both white as a bar of Ivory soap and about half-life-size — in a reclining pose that faintly echoes classical depictions of youthful lovers. West’s sculpture, however, captures a romantic embrace gone comically wrong: the hapless man (whose feet are adorned with the outline of socks) crumples over the woman, who struggles to climb out from under his weight, a wash of pink pigment on her face suggesting exertion, anger or shame. Whether we’re witnessing a heart attack, an anticlimactic coupling, or something else altogether is doubtful.
Georgine Ingold’s paintings have a similarly piquant quality. They masquerade as blue, Hopper-esque interiors — preternaturally quiet and dramatically lit by open windows — or golden, dimly illuminated ones suggestive of 1970s film stills, that reveal dubious assignations between the figures inside. (Sometimes less than dubious — in one beautiful image, a pair of naked lovers clearly make love on the floor of a stately apartment.) A handful pay homage to seminal sex movie Last Tango In Paris, depicting the avid and tortured lovers of that film; others simply place one or two figures in a hotel room in various state of undress and conjure the languid air of recent fucking.
Photographs by a trio of artists exhibit wide-ranging aesthetics. Muir Vidler catches his subjects head-on; in one large-scale color image, a frankly naked woman (the artist Spartacus Chetwynd), full-breasted with face painted blood-red, confronts the camera with a baby cradled in her hands; in another, a transgendered Venus vamps for the camera. Scot Sothern’s small, hazy, black-and-white prints feel intimate and otherworldly by comparison; in them you’ll find mysterious lovers, like a slender reclining figure clothed in a gleaming white bodysuit — an Olympia for 1990s LA — who seems to hover horizontally in space. Marta Soul poses dashing lovers wearing vintage garb in lip-lock configurations inside elegant apartments; the woman pictured, it turns out, is an alter ego of the artist, who kisses a different man in each photo.
And sculptures by Rebekah Bogard may offer the most intriguing meditation on sex as an exercise in cross-species imagination. Her ceramic forms resemble idealized anime-esque animals — cloyingly cute but less than innocent — with eyes screwed shut in ecstasy. Gleefully astride each other or nuzzling end-to-end, they strive for intimacy and the joy of being joined. What could be more human?
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2013.