Into the mythic

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Leesa Streifler, Parenting Revisited: portrait at 5 and 15 years. ( COLLECTION OF THE REGINA PUBLIC LIBRARY)

It's a touring exhibition by 10 female artists. It explores women's identities, roles, fantasies and sexualities.

Does that make Pandora's Box, opening Saturday at the Plug In gallery, a feminist show?

Like a lot of women in her age group, Amanda Cachia, 31, says she was reluctant to use the term "feminist" when she was assembling works for the 2008 show at Regina's Dunlop Art Gallery, where she is director/curator.

"I was wary of getting myself into that political arena," she says. She found, as well, that the show's artists in their 30s tended to be uncomfortable with the term, while the more mature artists were not. In the end, Cachia embraced the term.

"That has made the exhibition really personal for me, and really powerful," she says.

After a number of years in which feminist themes have been off the art radar screen, she says, there's been a recent resurgence with exhibitions such as Global Feminisms (2007) at the Brooklyn Museum and Hysteria and the Body (2004) at the National Gallery of Canada.

Most of the 10 creators in the ambitious Pandora's Box are widely exhibited artists of diverse cultural backgrounds who live in New York City. How did a Saskatchewan curator, organizing her first major show, persuade dealers, collectors and artists to lend works to the Dunlop for a two-year period?

"A lot of people had never heard of Regina," the curator acknowledges. But Cachia's background was a factor. She's an Australian who worked in New York galleries from about 2004 to 2006, fell in love there with a Saskatchewan man, and moved with him to Regina. (The relationship broke up, but Cachia stayed for the job at the Dunlop, which she loves.)

She travelled to New York to make pitches in person, and her passion opened doors for Pandora's Box, the overall title she gave the project.

The Greek myth of Pandora demonizes a woman for unleashing the world's evils. Pandora's "box" has obvious sexual connotations. But the 40-work show offers a new twist on the Pandora myth. Here, Cachia writes, "the opening of her miraculous box is a hopeful return of the repressed feminine."

New York artist Ghada Amer was born in Egypt. Her work French Kiss appears to be a canvas full of abstract, embroidered vertical squiggles and splashes. Look very closely, though, and a repeated image of two people kissing hides behind the "veil" of embroidery -- a reference to the Muslim hijab.

Another New York-based artist, Wangechi Mutu, is from Kenya. In her collage series Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, she takes archaic medical illustrations of diseased female reproductive organs and transforms them into grotesque African faces.

Self-portraiture is used by several artists, including Leesa Streifler, a former Winnipegger. In Parenting Revisited: portrait at 5 and 15 years, Streifler has written and drawn on childhood studio photographs of herself. Words such as "Practised smile in the mirror" reveal the inner struggles behind the compliant feminine mask.

A work by Singapore-born New York artist Su-en Wong shows seven iterations of the artist herself, positioned on a playground structure as if to suggest a diversity of possible roles.

Women as mothers and domestic workers are here, too. Two works by Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook show a wife doing chores while a man takes it easy on a chair. A surreal work by New York's Amy Cutler shows a fairy-tale-like woman with a wire basket of eggs in place of her head.

Other notable New Yorkers in the show are Laylah Ali and Kara Walker.

One of the exhibition's provocative works ignited a controversy in Regina. Titled Inside Pandora #2, it's a large mural by New Yorker Chitra Ganesh, a lesbian of Indian ancestry whose influences include Bollywood movies and Hindu mythology. It depicts a reclining nude woman smoking a hookah pipe that is connected to her anatomy.

The Dunlop Art Gallery is part of the Regina Public Library. Although Cachia had posted warnings and blacked out the glass wall that separates the gallery from the library, an older gentleman caught sight of the hookah-smoker in the final two weeks of the show. He took his complaint to the local paper.

Cachia ended up feeling that the subsequent publicity storm was good for her professional development because it forced her to defend her curatorial decisions.

"Then we had a big spike in attendance," she says.

Curator Amanda Cachia and Pandora's Box artists Shary Boyle and Leesa Streifler give a public talk about their work, 3 p.m. Saturday at Plug In, 286 McDermot Ave.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 4, 2009 D1