Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 01/24/2012 - 12:00am
Ilene Segalove, Pinky, 1979. Courtesy Jancar Gallery
When Pacific Standard Time -- the current region-wide, Getty-funded initiative to celebrate SoCal art history -- began, Susan Mogul noticed how male-centric and safe the Getty’s initial ad campaigns were. They paired big-deal artists Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari with immediately recognizable pop personalities (Ed with Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kedis and Baldessari with Bored to Death’s Jason Schwartzman), suggesting only celebrity and icon-hood could compel people to see art. Mogul, featured in a number of Pacific Standard Time shows herself, decided to counter this message, creating a spontaneous “Susan Mogul Time” poster campaign and pasting images of herself in a vintage orange suit jacket around the city alongside posters of Schwartzman and Kedis.
This kind of feisty, DIY-initiative permeates Jancar Gallery’s exhibition (on view through February 4) of artwork by Mogul, Ilene Segalove, and Hildegarde Duane, all of whom work primarily in conceptual photo and video. Its title, “Vintage Work,” pokes fun at the fact that the 1970s and ‘80s art of these three is receiving an upsurge in retrospective attention (in 2009, all three had solo shows of their early work at Jancar). But better now than never. All three are cheeky and spot-on in their awareness of their femininity in relation to the history of pop and print culture. Hildegarde Duane’s series of photographs, Seven Snow White and a Dwarf, turns a fairy tale princess into a noir-ish femme fatale. For Pinky, an archival inkjet print from 1979, Ilene Segalove dressed her pinky in flowing white and a veil to resemble the docile, flush-cheeked heroine of an antique painting. In the collage Moses Mogul Receives the 11th Commandment, Mogul appears as a nerdier, scatter-brained iteration of the 50-foot woman stomping through L.A. and holding tablets that command: “Thou shalt not be denied equality on account of sex.”
By Catherine Wagley
