Corbett vs. Dempsey

Ann Starr and Linda Kramer

By Ruth Lopez: Time Out Chicago / Issue 9 : Apr 28-May 4, 2005

The first works in this two-person exhibition are seven drawings displayed as a group. Clinicians, the first of Starr's small drawings, shows a nurse with a red cross on her chest standing near a decidedly male doctor in a suit. A green chair with claws appears in one drawing provoking a feeling of entrapment. In all of the works, watercolor and pencil are delicately smeared to create texture. Kramer's single large drawing could perhaps be one of Starr's: Untitled (Woman-Creature & Uncle Sam) has a similar carefully rendered tactility. A man with money bags sits behind a woman with claws wearing a rosary. These drawings, placed as a set, beg a comparison between the two artists. Both are women, both use similar images and icons, and both create work about women's issues.

But in many ways the similarities end there. Starr presents scenes of hospital stays and mental illness, presumably her own, mostly created in the mid-'90s. A few, such as Anatomically Correct Woman, are intensely beautiful. Yet Kramer's drawings, all from the 1970s, are far more interesting. They make a larger political statement about the objectification of women and the role that the artist plays in that process.

Further into the show, Kramer's drawings become louder in-your-face portrayals of women, mostly as pornographic toys. Many of her drawings in this exhibition are from the "Chicago Plateboy" series. As a prominent Chicago artist, Kramer has made work on the fringe of the Imagist movement. Why she is hesitant to call herself an Imagist is apparent in this series of never previously exhibited work. In Chicago Plateboy I, a woman with bunny ears rests her perky breasts in a plate of half-eaten food. By Chicago Plateboy IV, droopy breasts and old age have made the Plateboy inedible. Kramer partly remarks on the Imagist artists of the 1970s, several of whom illustrated for Playboy. Yet the release of the drawings prompts a larger question: What is the role of feminism in art today?