MEDIA SAVVY
Sculptor Rachel Feinstein’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Maiden, Mother, Crone, is less powerful as an examination of those female archetypes than as as study in various formal media. Feinstein uses different techniques to model the mostly life-size female figures here: painted wood, enameled aluminum, resin, mirror, nylon, foam, plaster, majolica, and plastic. Though they are shaped boldly, even sloppily, there is a balance and fineness to them. It doesn’t surprise that Feinstein first conceives them as drawings and small maquettes before building them to scale. They are more line and space than mass.
The exhibit is an elegant affair. In one light-filled gallery there are maidens, mothers, and one madonna. In another gallery, dim, with silvered wallcovering, there are crones. This dichotomy reinforces the misogyny built into the archetypes, but that seems beside the point. The depictions all feel remote, intellectualized, with no real women implicated. Only two figures – Angel (a Victoria’s Secret runway model) and Butterfly (a stripper) – flutter to life, perhaps because they are rendered in overtly sexual postures, and rather unkindly, with pads of crazily-colored flesh smeared along their slender figures. Although they are meant to be ugly they remain, in line and form, poised.
All the sculptures are undone, casually, by a series of small portraits hung on one wall in the maiden/mother gallery. The gentlewomen in them are rendered warmly, expressively, and particularly, with loose strokes of enamel on oval-shaped mirror panels, in the manner of eighteenth-century cameos. They move beyond caricature, getting at the character of the women depicted. These are not attractive women; they are rich, idle, haughty, bored, clueless and agitated. But they are real. And this undoes, casually, the archetypes in which women are everywhere elsewhere frozen here.
Photograph courtesy of The Jewish Museum.