Julie Linowes’ “Leave Your Tie at the Door”
There are seven days in a week, seven colors in a rainbow, seven notes on the diatonic scale, seven deadly sins and as many virtues, seven continents, and, according to Shakespeare, seven ages of man.
And there are seven women—and seven ages of women—in Julie Linowes’ “Leave Your Tie at the Door.”
Multimedia and multisensory, Julie Linowes’ inspiring installation “Leave Your Tie at the Door” incorporates these colors and sounds and not a few of the sins and virtues.
Here is an altarpiece of digital photographic collages, of videos that show girls and women dance, cry, embrace, and protest—scored to the voices of an all-female choir. The vibe is religious; the faith is feminist. The beliefs are articulated in slogans on placards carried by girls and women in the video clips. For instance, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights.”
Begin with five black-aluminum framed lightboxes, each roughly the proportion of a large HDTV screen. In them the recurring motif of the digital images created in the style of Old Master paintings is that of seven steadfast female activists resisting what appears to be a war on women. They are a multicultural unit reflecting the heritage of all seven continents. Their nakedness, unlike that of the nudes in Renaissance or Baroque paintings, is incidental rather than idealized.
These seven women are allegorical. They live in a place where armed conflict, a police state, racist demonstrations, and polluting industries rage outside. To protect a newborn, and each other, this band of sisters takes cover in battle-scarred spaces. If Linowes appropriates the familiar colors and symbols of Renaissance art, it is not to communicate religious sacraments, but to illuminate civic resistance and engagement. The newborn is not baby Jesus, but a symbol of the next generation.
Similarly, though Linowes’ iconography includes angels and stained-glass windows, their presence in the digital tableaux suggests figurative rather than literal readings. I took the angels to represent what Abraham Lincoln described as “the better angels of our nature.” I saw the stained-glass interior as a suggestion of a sacred space where the women have taken shelter.
Like the digital images, which contain as many as 200 to 300 layers, there are multiple strata to the installation itself. As the viewer descends to the exhibition space, she is greeted by the music of composer David Roth who assembled melodies improvised in response to the video images projected onto the rear of the lightboxes. The chorale serves as a bridge between the still tableaux and the moving (in both meanings of the word) video images, linking the allegorical seven to the real-life girls and women in the clips.
One layer is how Linowes frames the lightboxes. Rather than a neutral surround, each frame replicates the face of a vintage box camera or view camera, introducing the idea of the instrument as phallus or weapon. In On Photography, Susan Sontag described this as “an inescapable metaphor that everyone unconsciously employs... named without subtlety when we talk about ‘loading’ or ‘aiming’ a camera, about ‘shooting’ a film.”
Consciously or unconsciously, camera manufacturers also employed such metaphors when marketing these mid 20th-century devices. “Brownie Target” is the name of both one lightbox and the camera that frames it. Six of the women stand as one uplifts the seventh, whose recumbent body forms a horizontal axis. The frame is blazoned with the faintly suggestive manufacturer’s slogan: “Two brilliant finders for horizontal and vertical subjects.” The levity of the camera slogans is in sharp contrast to the gravity of the lightbox imagery. Likewise these Old Master-like scenes were created with bleeding-edge digital technology.
On one side of the lightboxes, the agonies of war in digital collages where women, particularly older women, are the targets, playing defense. On the other, the ecstasies of girlhood and womanhood in the videos where they are the agents of change, are now on the offense. Linowes’ gift to the viewer is to confront her first with the worst that can happen. And then remind her that an older generation has shown a younger one that though the world sometimes seems tilted against them, they are full citizens of that world.
—Carrie Rickey