(Editor’s Note: This article was written by Kate Preziosi ’10)
Two dramatically different exhibitions in the Picker Art Gallery each deal with the common theme of challenging conventional stereotypes.
In Of Someone and Something, associate art and art history professor Linn Underhill displays selections from seven major photographic series that she has created since the early 1990s. The images were taken in the studio, with several different props and the artist as her own model.
The retrospective includes images from Cosmic Dominatrix, 2000-2001, in which Underhill said the idea was “to think about how it would look if women were in charge of the world, and if they behaved in a way comparable to the way men behave in power.”
This alternative world includes an image of Underhill as a leather-clad goddess hovering on a black cloud in a scene reminiscent of Michelangelo’s fresco.
“[This exhibition was] informed by feminist theory and gender theory, and much of it has to do with trying to come up with new ways of representing women and thinking about gender as a masquerade,” explained Underhill. Her hope, she said, was that Ƶ students would walk away “think[ing] about gender roles as being malleable.”
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Just opposite Underhill’s exhibition is German photographer Christina Zück’s Defence Phase II Karachi, a series of photographs, taken with an analog medium-format camera, that depict her stay in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2008.
Curator Joachim Homann explained that the images “are an investigation of public life in a city in Pakistan that is so often in the news because of the difficult political situation, with an officially pro-American government that is getting all these different demands from the people there.”
Homann has known Zück and admired her work since they were in graduate school in Germany together. “She really wants to allow visitors to zoom in on individual images, and in those images, you will find details that might teach you something about the reality,” he said.
One such photograph depicts two women on a street corner wearing hijabs. One woman is turning away, the other, staring into the camera.
Homann pointed out that on closer examination, the woman who is staring is carrying a notebook with diagrams of DNA on the outside, suggesting she is in a medical profession of some kind.
“The camera is a way for Christina to communicate with people,” said Homann. “She is always very interested in how the subjects react to her presence. She’s also bringing her own cultural values into this context, and that’s reflected in the images as well. This precludes her from giving an objective narrative. It is more an open-ended conversation that she hopes to provoke.”