Get me off this Rock! & other new works

          Though they are an enormous departure, stylistically, from the majority of his studio work, Andrew Wodzianski’s “Androids” are linked to his oeuvre through their scrutiny and subversion of pop culture icons and societal norms.  In this case, Wodzianski takes on the genderization and bias of children’s toys, in particular “Fashion Plates”, which were popular drawing toys during the late 1970s.  By combining traditional feminine imagery, such as voluminous party dresses and bouncy blond Barbiesque pony-tails, with perplexing and often malicious mechanical body parts (stemming from male versions of “Fashion Plates”) Wodzianski is questioning our predetermined notion of femininity and its formation in the earliest processes of childhood development.

          Coinciding with one of the most precarious times in Women’s History, when feminist activism is at a low and mass media continues to present a narrow view of femininity (that centered on physical beauty), Wodzianski, is uncovering this confusing role of the female in the 21^st century in which she must be both beautiful and powerful; controllable yet diabolical.   In the show’s title work, Get me off this Rock!, a pink muscle bound body, with rockets strapped to its ankles, blasts off from a fiery orb set upon a striped wall-paper like background.  This strange female astronaut consists of a disproportionately large head, which is cropped at her immense, piercing blue eyes.  We see that Wodzianksi has paired this traditionally beautiful and attention grabbing face with a testosterone ridden body.  In addition she is literally escaping the restrictions that the planet below represents.    

          Wodzianski strengthens the meaning of his illustrations by using materials and techniques that are, for the most part (like the “Fashion Plates” themselves), exclusively marketed to and used by women—those associated with the craft arts such as scrap-booking paper and textiles.  Such is the case with his large-scale work entitled Assembly Ball.  Here half-human, half-machine figures are placed dead center on patterned archival paper. The figures at the center of each consist of capacious ballroom skirts and formidable machine torsos and heads.  Pieced together in “Fashion Plates” manner, these entities represent a myriad of attitudes toward the female gender who is both frightening (with her obvious power to harm) yet also portrayed as a mindless automaton in a pretty skirt.   

          Through ambiguous forms, gendered materials, and pointed presentation (notice how each work is identical, and when grouped together implies a market place with Barbie doll-like icons, under glass, lined up in neat, department store-like order) Wodzianksi confronts us with issues—issues about uniformity, consumerism, female empowerment as well as subjugation, and the societal pressures that are modeled to children and adults through mass media.