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Elizabeth Newman's work is an exercise in the gentle art of antiphrasis. By subtly displacing apparently simple visual signs into another, opposite, register contradictory and ironic meanings emerge. As it turns out, these are not benign aesthetic ambiguities, but politically loaded commentaries. One of the wittier works, Untitled 1988, is a case in point. This is a small painting in oils of two flowers, one red, one blue on a gold ground that is too thin for the unprimed canvas. Newman makes no attempt at a sensuous description but instead indicates the flowers as felicitous accidents of colour and line. Through the apt use of this rude technique Newman parodies the iconic status of the art object in modernist culture. In so doing Newman's work also engages in a more specifically feminist critique of the asymmetrical relations between gender, language and identity which underlie western cultural practices.
Newman's work demonstrates the disconcerting degree to which such historically variable practices as the exhibition of art works, and the attitudes we bear towards "art" are coded sexually. Her approach is an economic, self-effacing one that can be initially discerned in the show's over obvious title, Art Exhibition. It is a style that evidently informed the installation of the exhibition as much as it did the individual works. The overall effect was of a mock art show, an intangible domesticity seemed to invade the measured spaces of the public gallery. The exhibition space was too small and the works too densely packed without any underlying syntax aside from a certain "eye" for superficial connections of colour and pattern between some of the paintings.
The paintings themselves are just as unforthcoming. Brightly coloured schematic