Berry Tompkins's "Just a Pretty Face" took a fresh approach to curating the output of an artist whose career spans decades. The exhibition brought together three aesthetically heterogeneous series that evidenced the breadth of material and conceptual approaches employed by Tompkins over a thirty-three-year period.
Pride of place was given to "Insults & Laments," 2018, the newest and strongest series in the show. This group of two-by-two-foot paintings features blurry grisaille close-ups of airbrushed vulvae emblazoned with delicate pink utterances that index different valences of abuse in intimate contexts, such as WHY DO YOU MAKE ME HURT YOU, YOU ARE FAT, and CALM DOWN. Some of the phrases, including NO ONE IS GOING TO BELIEVE YOU, pointedly underline the predatory nature of certain gaslighting tactics, while others, including I TRIED SO HARD, are mantras that feel vital to survival or repair. In their square format and juxtaposition of image and text, these paintings mobilize the aesthetics of meme culture to gently insist on the pervasive presence of more insidious power imbalances that stem from and contribute to discriminatory valuations of different bodies.
While the "lnsults & Laments" paintings describe the gendered terms of these power dynamics, they also subvert the assumptions that the pairing of vulvae and pink text might trigger. The close focus on abstracted vulvae renders the gender of the implied subject oblique, enabling the works to describe a relationship between genitalia, identity, and violence without necessarily reifying chose links. This conceptual troubling is underwritten by a formal one; in some instances, the rose-hued language makes the paintings' gray surfaces look blue. By toying with stereotypically masculine and feminine colors in this way, Tompkins further unsettles gendered assumptions about abusers, victims, and survivors. This body of work suggests, in other words, chat although the patriarchy has historically enabled and even privileged the abuse of women by men, power and its pursuit arc what corrupt fundamentally.
The other highlights of the show were from the artist's "Tool Series," 1990-2000, in which various household and gardening items–an axe head, a frying pan–contain painted images of seminude bodies or classical statuary in pastoral settings. The clear standout here was Limb from Limb, 1991, in which a circular-saw blade features two classical sculptures positioned in a densely flowered clearing, locked in eternal combat, while a rabbit looks on from the bottom of the composition's serrated left edge. The subjects are a confusion of gender: One figure in a toga with a masculine face has breasts and pulls firmly on the arm of the second figure, headless, which has a flat, chiseled chest and wide hips. Leaning in opposite directions, the subjects create a narrative tension around the hole at the center of the blade. Alongside ocher objects from this series, this work also tells a larger story about desire and power that is both materially sharp and conceptually wry.
"Insults & Laments" challenged audiences by delicately queering the aesthetics of binary gender dynamics and the more worn-our taboos surrounding them. Those who feel fluent in the language of feminism–and those who tend to disengage from art thar seems to traffic in it–were invited to wade beyond their own assumptions to get to the subtle complexity of this newest series. Seeing it in the context of Tompkins's older works might have been, at least for the time being, crucial to that labor.
While the show remained palpably indebted to second-wave feminism, it was not dragged down by the historical perceptions of subjectivity and agency one might associate with such a connection. Rather, the artist managed to complicate how we experience the harmful effects of power by breaking apart our more timeworn ideas surrounding gender.