More Good Stuff: CCA webpage and review from the Bay Area Reporter

My painting is representing part of the Painting/Drawing webpage for CCA's undergraduate study.  Yeah!  Does this mean I don't owe them loan money anymore?

Design credit Max Batt

In other exciting news, I just saw a new review of our show at Marx and Zavattero by Sura Wood at the Bay Area Reporter "Coming soon to a gallery near you".  It's so nice to get some press action!

Marx & Zavattero: Fabrications. Women rule in this intriguing group exhibition of works on paper by five female provocateurs. Critiquing society, fashion, women's roles and media images, Melissa Manfull, Taravat Talepasand, Serena Cole, and gay artists Jennifer Celio and Libby Black traffic in fantasy rooted in sober reality. Iranian-American Talepasand goes for the jugular with "Death to Bitches," a graphic depiction of a male executioner wielding a sword in one hand, and clutching the heads of two decapitated women by their hair in another.

Black and Cole satirize the tyranny of fashion, albeit in their ow

"Prince Charming" (2010), by Libby Black. Photo: Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco

n subversive ways, while questioning the allure of pricey objects of desire and the models they adorn. A chance for women, trapped by the ways others insist on seeing them, to inhabit alternate lives, perhaps? Black's "Life as a Tale" is a disquieting pencil drawing of a masked female superheroine pausing for a moment of reflection. If we are indeed what we wear, Supergirl here has it made. In the artist's "Untitled (Balenciaga)," a chic woman with mussed, dirty-blond hair, wearing green gaucho pants, a cropped purple jacket and shoes with dazzling yellow accents, stands in an elegantly appointed drawing room worthy of a Ralph Lauren campaign. Forget the pants. I wanted the shoes and jacket. Black may not have intended to inspire retail lust, but there you go. This piece and others challenge the incongruity of a prevalent message in fashion advertising – snazzy pumps, designer glasses and blase attitude equal old money, or just money, period.

In Cole's "Burning Down the World I," a fetching willowy model in fashionable military garb, the tails of her jacket blowing in the breeze, poses triumphantly next to a flaming bush. Cole's coltish girl with giraffe-patterned tights and reddened eyes standing at the edge of a forest clearing in "I'm an Animal I," and what looks like the same model unmasked, sullen and skinny in a tank top and lank hair in "I'm an Animal II," are simultaneously seductive and troubling, which is, after all, the point.

See more from Libby in a post I made about her show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art here.