"Sugar and Spice".

Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle WA May 2-28, 2008

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As with most painting, the medium of photography is not neutral or unambiguous. A characteristic of the photograph is that it foregrounds fine details that would perhaps be lost in more traditional media. It is at this frontier that the combined work of Susan

Anderson, Amy Stevens, and Alex Prager lines up. Anderson's pseudonymously "documentary" High Glitz series was photographed at child beauty pageants. The selection criteria for these pageants (which took off in the 1960s) are based on the idea of a "complete package," involving capability, poise, perfection, and confidence. Pageants in general seem to be a kind of social sculpture (like bodybuilding), and such represent a strange microcosm of American self-idolatry. Danica, Age 5, Santa Ana, CA (2005) features a horsy-toothed tot with doctored eyelashes like bullwhips, confectionery hair, and a tiny crease of baby cleavage stuffed into a red polka-dot dress. A thick Paris is Burning pall of sensuality hangs over these contests, a legendary drag ball mentality perversely realized in an ideal body of sexual maturity, defining as much an extreme form of spectacle as the eruption of forbidden desire.

Described as a "celebration of birthdays, of cake, color, pattern and obsessive absurdity," Stevens's Confections series features cakes she made using a Martha Stewart kit and instructional video. This series started out as a response to the artist turning 30, with the notion that she would bake 30 birthday cakes. The cakes are squarely placed and tightly framed within the images, set onto a small seamless tabletop sheet of jarring fabric whose analogous colors and designs mimic those of the cakes. Confections #51 (2007) is an archival inkjet print of an acid-green and chocolate frosted cake neatly camouflaged against an equally ornate background exhibiting a symmetrical, tan-over-brown floral pattern. The excessive quality of the decoration spills over into a kind of visual noise, wherein the all-over space is filled up and its delicious content neutralized.

Prager's Polyester images mine the visual fields of cinema. Titled after the 1981 John Waters's film starring Divine, and which is itself based on elements from Douglas Sirk's films like All That Heaven Allows (1955), the models of this series are situated in melodramatic scenes like snippets from a time-worn cinescape, where accepted codes and roles always peek uncomfortably through. Temporality is established via a language of vernacular styling, such as occurs with the title figure in Alexandra (2007), connecting us to a timeframe when the term stewardess (rather than flight attendant) was widely used. Her ill-fitting blonde wig is so obvious that the intention itself comes to the fore, as well might be said about these three bodies of work as a whole, putting all hope of closure and seamlessness to rest. Alexandra interrogates how the feminine self has been culturally defined and conjugated, in this case by pointing to the misuse of photographic or cinematic media as forms of representational truth.

Indeed, to recall performance legend Leigh Bowery's persistent demand, a question like "where's the poison?" also applies in this context. The answer may lie in how these projects--the stewardess's louche expression, the child beauty grotesqueries, the colorfully disheveled cakes--tend to dissolve under the weight of this crossfire, opening themselves up to fields of mutual disclosure, yet all the while pushing the rewind button in search of perfection.