‘Some Fine Women’ at Vast Space Projects is a robust top-grade show
Las Vegas Weekly Dawn-Michelle Baude Wed, Aug 7, 2013

The title, Some Fine Women, understates. “Many fine women” is a more accurate description of a robust multimedia show with a whopping 60-plus works by 36 artists…

Women artists, the show insists, interpret the world differently than men, whether through form, shape, color or material. The position is less accusative—men-hating feminists are so last-century—than matter-of-fact. But the message, that culturally dominant notions of beauty and behavior are the legacy of male desire, comes across explicitly in some works, or, in the case of Edith Beaucage, with a kind of fiendish joy. Although her paintings recall misogynistic portraits by Picasso and de Kooning (painterly canvases thick with contempt), Beaucage’s buxom-nosed women are light-hearted. She deconstructs the canon of female beauty with a disarming naiveté.

…Mary Warner’s paintings—masterful works of waning sunflowers—take on the canon in a different way, by turning clichéd symbols of female vulnerability into botanical aliens. Warner’s florals verge on abstraction, the details functioning like theatrical microcosms where the fervid drama of creativity takes place… Read article