At the Epsten, Women to Watch questions nature

The Epsten Gallery’s Women to Watch: 2015 (Women, Nature & Art) gathers a menacing, magical, sometimes mesmerizing bouquet. The exhibition, a collaboration with the Greater Kansas City Area Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, features five local artists, each concerned with how nature mirrors or punishes femininity.

Rain Harris’ “Glaciem” is an intricate alien biome, one of the most striking pieces I’ve seen from the artist. A ceramic pedestal the color of a yawning winter sky boosts climbing branches, each swollen with the delicate heads of silk flowers. The whole sculpture drips with a dizzyingly clear coating of “ice”: Winter, it suggests, came violently, freezing healthy blooms to their branches in cornflake clusters.

Harris’ previous works have explored the intersection of gaudiness and authenticity with thickly layered ironies. But “Glaciem” seems more sincere, its fragility tinged with hope. You can almost convince yourself that the flowers aren’t dead but suspended, simply waiting to be freed by spring’s thaw.

“Floe” applies a similar aesthetic to man-made forms, its frozen flowers coiling around glazed porcelain scrolls. Finely inked floral details call china patterns to mind, the artificial aping the natural. The glassy glaze is simultaneously elegiac and indulgent, like a widow in costume jewelry.

Diana Heise’s single-channel video provides a more earnest, if uncomplicated, view of femininity. The visuals are straightforward: a progression of still images depicting tall white flowers. What’s remarkable is their relationship to Heise’s audio. As she recounts a story of buying a vase in Cairo, the stills become a subordinated emotional soundtrack to her memories. Angles change, and colors flush from cool to warm as the artist’s voice softens in a tender moment.

Connections between the floral and the feminine emerge again in Lara Shipley’s photographs. “Having Heard the Old Stories” captures a bored-looking young woman posed in front of a dense thicket of greenery. The wild flora sparks a threatening contrast to the woman’s neat, floral-print dress, robbing the pattern of its demure femininity.

All of Shipley’s photographs on display at the Epsten center on the myth of the “spook light,” a ghoulish traveling orb said to be seen in the woods near the Ozarks. But it’s her human portraits, not her supernatural landscapes, that linger in your imagination.

“The Boys That Scared Me” captures two tattooed, shirtless Ozark boys in grainy black and white. The center-most figure stares defiantly into the camera, hand blurred at his side as if caught in sudden motion. Shipley’s technical mastery is on better display elsewhere, but there’s something hypnotic about this portrait. It feels hastily taken to appease — or to avoid inciting — its subjects. We sense Shipley’s hand in its creation more deliberately, an experience inviting us to empathize with her position as a woman in an at-times threatening world.

“From the Water” is one of the exhibition’s most striking images, rooting you to the floor with a similar sense of the otherworldly. A naked toddler, jellyfish-pale, splashes in shallow water, his downy hair an impossible white. Though the scene around the child is out of focus, his figure is arrestingly clear, shadows dappling his skin like bruises. In Shipley’s lens, the child takes on mythic stature. You can’t help but imagine him emerging from some dark depth to play on the rocky beach. Long after I’d moved on from the image, I kept peeking over my shoulder, expecting him to have somehow disappeared from the frame. Shipley can make even a frozen image shimmer like a mirage.

Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin’s intricate textiles paint familiar landscapes in a more agentive, aggressive light. The artist’s “Untitled Triptych” — three panels of hand-dyed and -stitched muslin — taps into a complicated history between African-Americans and pastoral settings reminiscent of the Old South. Thompson-Ruffin’s trees are royally adorned, bark furrows stitched in brilliant gold thread. But the oversized leaves that droop from their branches are flatly colored, a frostbitten-black.

Trees are a crucial, forked symbol for Thompson-Ruffin — they can provide shade and cover or instruments for whippings, hangings and burnings. The triptych’s hand-piecing and dye techniques recall antebellum craft tradition, its complicated images reminding us that nature can be both nurturing and cruel. But there’s cautious hope, if not healing, to be gleaned: A pigmented, red-soaked background in the leftmost panel blots, in another, to a soft, subtle spray of dye.

Linda Lighton’s swollen sculptures strike a similar chord, evoking organic forms subsumed (or seduced) by violence. But Lighton’s works are unique among these offerings in their charged sexuality. The fat, writhing stems of “Triple Zinnia” practically moan beneath the glass, their flower petals arched like lapping tongues. Nature is also a tease.

“Camouflora” is even livelier. China paint adds bold green and brown splotches to the enormous blooms, a forward gesture that belies the camouflage. The ceramic stamens are like bullet casings hooded in lipstick-red. But the effect is more playful than threatening, as though Lighton is blowing an irreverent raspberry at instruments of would-be intimidation.

Lighton has taken more serious, critical aim at guns in the past, but you won’t see those works at the Epsten. Though originally selected for the exhibition, two of Lighton’s sculptures were replaced after the opening in deference to the residents of Village Shalom, one of two communities targeted in a shooting last April. You can, however, see photographs of Lighton’s sculptures on the gallery wall.

It’s hard to fault the Epsten for wanting to be sensitive to what is still, for many Village Shalom residents, a vivid and present fear. And it’s a testament to Lighton’s sculptures, perhaps, that they assert, in their presence, a power that their images cannot.

But it also raises interesting questions of representation. Other works in Women to Watch — I’m thinking primarily of Thompson-Ruffin’s — evoke even more violent histories and images. Do images of weapons affect us more than images of the damage they inflict? Is a sculpture inherently more threatening than a photograph?

We’ve all heard the rhetoric ad nauseam: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But if the decision to remove Lighton’s sculptures is any indication, it’s the guns we remember, the guns we fear.