Ann Agee at P.P.O.W - New York - sculpture exhibition - Brief Article

Ann Agee first caused comment in New York with a ceramic bathroom in Marcia Tucker's "Bad Girls" show at the New Museum: the work, created during a residency at the Kohler plumbing factory, included an ornamented sink, toilet and bidet as well as a tiled wall prettily depicting a sewage and water treatment system. Elsewhere, she later showed figurines of eccentrically dressed street characters, an approach later borrowed by the fashion section of the New York Times Magazine. Now she has taken those disparate characters into a new world: they're having babies.

The largest of five pedestal works at P.P.O.W., a 15-by-15-by-24-inch sculptural tableau depicting a birthing class, was shown alone in a room that it filled with its energy. Three couples and a midwife watch as another couple--she with legs spread, he supporting her from behind--hold up the doll representing the outcome of the process they're practicing. The watchers stand or kneel in their vivid apparel. The floor is littered with books, bottles of water, a clipboard and a model of a breast. Everyone wears a paper nametag and looks a little giddy. The figures are expressive and individual in posture, gesture and facial features, except that all have the long, slender bodies and elongated eyes that are Agee's standards. The couples are racially mixed and one is a lesbian family. The whole tableau is set upon a rococo footed platter, white with gold wave trim, that recalls the mirrored trays of mid-20th-century suburban dresser sets.

In a second small room, Agee showed two birth scenes and models of male and female reproductive organs, measuring from 4 1/2 to 9 inches tall. One of the scenes has a black-haired woman on a flowered blanket, her pink floral housecoat thrown open, her eyebrows raised and teeth clenched as she leans back on one elbow. The baby's emerging blood-smeared head is received by a smiling blonde midwife wearing an Indian gauze tunic and patterned leggings. In the other scene, mother (in a striped housecoat) looks happier and touches her husband behind her. The baby is half out, a young girl in a red dress, presumably her daughter, watches, and a woman of extremely elongated proportions assists.

The cheery genitals are health-manual illustrations pumped into three dimensions and bright hues (orange, plum, yellow, pink). The models are realistic enough to show the anus, yet the "edge" of the male's skin is treated with blue and white flowers, and the female version includes gold highlights. Agee is both earnest and spoofing. Her amiable vignettes recall '40s or '50s illustrations, and she draws on the figurine tradition in form and material if not in subject matter. Taste isn't an issue.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group