States of undress

One night in 2010, Elaine Jason was chatting with friends Candace Nicol and Stephanie Hogen at a reception for her exhibit at Oats Park Art Center. The conversation easily drifted to how all three use images of human bodies in their artwork, each in a different way.

“We should have a show,” someone said.

Their exhibit, Nudes and Neon, opens tomorrow at Sierra Arts. Here’s a primer on their variations on the theme of the fine-art nude.

In an age of digital everything, Stephanie Hogen often still shoots film and makes prints in a darkroom. She speaks passionately about light, about the way light waves and particles work, about the way light bouncing off a body can be almost spiritual.

Sometimes she abstracts the surface of a female body and “paints” on it using light shining through window panes. Other times, skin reflects light the way a sand dune does, a nod to both the definitive landscape nudes of the 1920s and ’30s—think Edward Weston—and to the way bodies can represent an idea.

To Hogen, the idea is to explore the layers of humanity underneath the armor of clothing.

“Sometimes clothes are used as a disguise,” she says. “Like, in a courtroom. The lawyer wants his client to dress a certain way so he won’t be judged by what he is wearing. But if you could see the vibrational energy through light coming off that person, clothing wouldn’t matter.”

Her work comes off quiet but vibrant, honest but not confrontational, a reminder that slowing down to really look at something—at all the scientific or spiritual or visual wonder hiding right before our eyes—can really be worth the effort.

Elaine Jason’s work resonates with the calculated, still-exuberant balance of someone who’s spent decades milking the solitude of her studio for all it’s worth. She takes her influences from everyday life, using found objects like leaves or picture frames, and from art history. The prolific 20th-century sculptor Louise Nevelson’s monochrome-painted, box-like wall sculptures must have provided a jumping-off point for the way Jason uses depth and shapes.

She ruthlessly edits her materials into tight compositions the way a competent poet distills a mountain of thoughts down in to a handful of words that show you that whole mountain.

Jason uses a heretofore extremist medium, neon, traditionally loved for its commercial gleam, disparaged for being overly seductive, and not much in between. She simply threads it through a sculpture whose planes jut in several directions, tying it all together with a single, glowing line.

One day, a scrap of plywood became the outline of a female figure. Since then, references to female bodies have shown up in her work regularly.

Candace Nicol turns the tables on convention by photographing mostly men. But her pictures are nothing like the stark, ultra-frank photos by, say, Robert Mapplethorpe that might come to mind when you hear the words “male nudes.” The models pose the way women traditionally pose in art photographs, comfortable, pensive, usually looking away. Their job, for the moment, is to be looked at and admired.

While she doesn’t hide body parts, she does build in a few levels of visual complexity, creating a brief-lasting illusion that she might have obscured the bodies. She’ll cut a larger-than-life portrait into tiles, coat them with glossy, clear plastic, then reassemble them. Or she’ll spread on a decorative layer of dreamy color or a floral pattern. These layers operate more like a “look into this theater” kind of curtain than a “draw the blinds and hide this” kind of curtain, which places Nicol’s photo collages smack dab in between, “Oh, it’s just a body. No biggee.” and “Look! It’s the ever-miraculously inspiring human body!”