Naked truths
Artist's larger-than-life confrontational images challenge viewers
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

Annie Murphy-Robinson makes a powerful debut in her show of large-scale figure drawings, mostly nude self-portraits drawn from life, at Sacramento City College's Gregory Kondos Gallery.

Some feminists have made much of the so-called "male gaze," which they believe demeans women in paintings such as Velasquez's "Rokeby Venus" and Manet's "Olympia." Whether you buy into their ideology or not, you have to wonder what such critics would make of Murphy-Robinson's work, in which an aggressively nude female gazes defiantly both at herself and the viewer.

In terms of postmodern politics, perhaps the only person who can exploit the female body safely is a woman. And exploit it Murphy-Robinson does, giving us unflinching views of her body in bold, confrontational images that challenge the viewer with their graphic nakedness. Executed with visceral muscularity, these over-life-sized charcoal drawings have an immediacy that makes the viewer squirm.

In "Character Study," she throws down the gauntlet, daring the viewer to judge her with a spit-in-the-eye realism as she poses nude from the waist down. In "Head," she takes a gritty, straight-on look at her face, warts and all, with a verisimilitude that is almost sculptural. In "Jacob's Ladder," she plays a child's game with a string, her image limned in clean lines save where her hands are in motion.

Some of her images approach a heroic scale reminiscent of Michelangelo. Her body seen from the waist down, front and back, is rendered with classical precision in the diptych "Self-Portrait," in which her awkward stance reminds one fleetingly of Rembrandt's pigeon-toed, knock-kneed Eve. "Study of the Lower Back" is a keenly observed, marvelously sensual view of the complicated bones and musculature of the back.

In addition to the self-portraits, Murphy-Robinson shows a pair of intense drawings of a beaten-up dollhouse she found by the side of a road. Blown up to large scale, these dark, obsessively rendered images take on a surreal quality freighted with a sense of lost innocence and despair.

In contrast to Murphy-Robinson's bold, realistic figures, S.R. Jones gives us delicate and fanciful images of the female figure in his show of mixed-media collages at Jay Jay. The complex works usually begin with Polaroid photographs that are sanded, abraded and then altered with oil and graphite and collaged with found images. They combine four subjects of interest to Jones -- the female nude, tattoos, riparian landscapes and Islamic architecture.

These elements are blended into mysterious narrative images as exotic as tales from the Arabian Nights. Mixing pop culture with classical elements in one work, Jones gives us a sensual odalisque with a kitschy tattoo of a cowgirl on her arm, reclining in a roseate river landscape broken by mosques and minarets. In another piece, he poses in a stormy landscape a female figure embraced by an octopus that echoes the tattoo on her thigh.

In several works Jones incorporates elaborate Islamic tile patterns into the backgrounds, which create sublime, subliminal infrastructures for his images. In a couple of works, "Prayer"and "Ablution," the pattern almost takes over, insisting itself as the central theme in images of a man praying and a woman whose back is tattooed with f-holes like a violin.

Though the works are small, this is a large show with some interesting side paths. Jones moves into the arena of pure landscape with a long, horizontal scene of a river with minarets on the far bank. In a trio of images using found photographs from the past century, he offers dark and disturbing erotic images of nudes that make one think of the famed photos of Storeyville prostitutes. Another series focuses on veiled nudes embedded in images altered with street detritus. In some ways, these recessive, whisper-soft images have more mystery than some of Jones' more elaborate works.

Jones' work shares the space at Jay Jay with a show of fragile watercolors by Stacey Vetter, titled "Murmur." It's an apt description of these barely-there images of chains and clusters of circular forms that suggest cellular structures or constellations in a distant galaxy.

Though reminiscent of works by Julia Couzens, a trio of paintings of red globules, ranging from opaque to transparent, come off as the strongest works in the show. Their pure colors are radiant on gorgeous, gold-tinged paper as soft and inviting as skin.

Other works suggest the mysterious process of nature at its most elemental level.

"Trail" might be a delicate insect trail or a pathway of tiny planets in the sky. "Blue Murmur" suggests aqueous bubbles forming clusters that entwine like DNA helixes. As the title of the show implies, this is very quiet work -- internal, meditative and unconcerned with the noisy ways of the outside world.