Moving away from digitally re-constituted 2-dimensional realities, Karen Brown, Heidi Kumao, and Mary Ziegler create 3-dimensional works that reflect on the human psyche. Carefully chosen materials and technologies adroitly deliver their aesthetic metaphors. Brown's small raku sculptures with isolated openings, require close, intimate viewing in order to glimpse their glowing, innards -- holograms of machine parts. Here a delicate balance is struck, an ancient technology with a modern technology, control and the lack of it -- perhaps revealing the artist's own struggle with the same. Kumao's work moves more pointedly into the world of women's issues. Common household objects are fitted with her uniquely crafted zoetrope-like projection mechanisms that loop cinematic re-enactments of a simple task or gesture. Like memories that cannot be repressed, her sculptural frameworks and flickering images often speak the unspeakable. Less literal or personal, Ziegler's kinetic sculptures are machines that seem to lack purpose. However, if one can forego a snap judgement to just watch and listen ö her mechanical inventions reveal an interplay of unseen forces. In "Fishing", a suspended, rotating sewing needle appears to have power over the ability of a coin to stay "on the right track" or when it falters and falls, to assist in re-asserting it on its pathöö an apt physical metaphor for issues of chance, destiny, and fate which are the signature of her provocative work.

The digital monotypes of Lynn Pocock posses many of the qualities of the previously mentioned artists. In her "Pages from a Diary" series, she shares introspective images of places and events that create the visual context of her inner world. Her juxtaposition of digitized photographs, drawings, and objects is the vehicle for conveying emotional content. However, it is her ability to capture a quality of pristine light and sensuality of surface that is most compelling about the work. She does this by taking-back the physical act of printing ö through the monotype process -- of hand-pulling each print from a digitally produced printing plate. The visual effect yields a soft vulnerability totally appropriate for images that dare to "bare one's sole."

Switching from the personal, the work of Danielle Wilde and Annette Weintraub pull us into the social world of the voyeur. Wilde's collaborative work, "Flies," (part of a larger performance work, ABACUSPARTS) is a computer-mediated video representation of a "2-D choreography" that is performed in real-time on stage and simultaneously projected as a performative video in the space. Here, the technological voyeur ö the video camera -- captures a perspective that the audience cannot. Through juxtaposition, this new high-tech embodiment speaks to the issues of time and space, reality and fantasy, the social gaze, and aesthetic convention. "Flies" disorients the viewer in a refreshing way. Well, there is absolutely no doubt about where you are journeying while interacting with the CD-ROM/ webart project of Annette Weintraub. Very much a New Yorker still in love with the urban landscape, in her work, "Pedestrian," she digitally creates an elaborately layered, richly textural experience via text, sound and visual images. A walk through the city becomes the trigger for a meditation on space, time, human interaction, and the power of mundane objects to evoke memories. Her own luscious photography and newly found talent for the narrative combine in a classic work for the new art medium created by the World Wide Web.

And what exhibition would be complete without works that are politically (subversive) correct. Sally Minker and Madge Gleeson each present their "causes" in stylistically different ways, both irreverent to the core. Minker's "Seeds of Discontent" series was a celebrated part of this year's annual "Crest Hardware Show" in Brooklyn, where site-specific artworks are displayed for sale alongside the rest of the inventory. This is an artist that is not afraid to create images that are hilarious as long as they have an ironic underbelly. The digitally composed images that grace the covers of her seed packets combine a contortioned face instead of a ripe tomato on the vine. And the backside of the packet shows the world demographics in terms of healthy soil, air, and water needed for planting. However, the key to the map shows hardly a location fitting the bill. Madge Gleeson's work also has a graphic, in-your-face style, but the line of attack is directed at the sublime goals of the Internet as a model means of communication and geographic connectivity. "Magic Cookie", "Direct Mail," and "Pandora's Box," are all emblematic of her examination of this particular type of technological intrusion. Acutely aware of "the ethical dilemmas that occur when our ability to find out exceeds the need to know, when the development of technology outpaces social structure", Gleeson is an artist with a clear mission. To codify her message in visual terms, she has chosen to digitally print large black and white (no gray areas here!) images onto transparent material that is then sandwiched between glass (as in X-rays), and mounted with metal cases/frames that have handles at top and wheels at bottom. One can almost envision slick techno-salespeople rolling their transparent (to Gleeson) messages in your direction. Are you prepared?

Cynthia Pannucci
artist, curator, ASCI Director

A recent event with synergy to the WOMENTEK show was... CHIK TEK 97 at the San Jose Museum of Art. http://cadre.sjsu.edu/chik_tek