On a role

By SUSAN ASCHOFF

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 18, 2000

[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar] Sarah M. Howard plays with Dealer’s Choice, part of her “Get Lucky” series on sex and reproduction.

TAMPA -- A uterus becomes a poker table and the menstrual cycle's 28 days the numbers on a roulette wheel when Sarah M. Howard interprets the high-stakes gamble that is sex and reproduction.

For her thesis art exhibition in May, the University of South Florida graduate student invited guests to "get lucky." Gamers could spin the roulette wheel in a 3-foot, red resin bowl representing the vulva and dotted with white resin sperm. Or they could play a hand of cards with a silk-screened deck. The suits were not hearts and clubs but maternal, paternal, fetal and what Howard labeled phaleocratic, the politicians, doctors and religious zealots who would dictate sexuality for everyone.

The 29-year-old Howard makes a potent point with her games. Sexual identity is dealt not only by chromosomes but also by the dictates of society.

"A lot of it is issues of power: who's got control, and who's got control over whom," Howard says. To reach an audience often prudish about examining the topic, she encourages interaction with her multimedia work by including the familiar, from television sets to dressing screens.

"I like to take systems or some kind of form recognized in our society as a segue. Then I subvert a feminine perspective into the work," she says.

For the Tampa show, Howard presents Gender Bender, an operable slot machine that spins and stops on unusual chromosome combinations. One of the pictures, the jester, has testicles and ovaries.

In another work, Measure Up, she covered one side of a folding screen with a distorting mirror, then glued tape measures onto the mirror. Each tape shows a circumference measured on her body, from head to feet. She upholstered the back of the screen with 60 polymer breasts, cast from molds of her own.

"It ended up being almost like a self-portrait, a physical measure of my existence," she says.

The mobile child of a military father, Howard came to Tampa three years ago to study for her master's in fine arts. She says there was no defining moment that forged her feminist view. Her art communicates what she knows. She researches medical textbooks for images; the execution frequently requires brawn. When the roulette wheel is disassembled, it takes four men to lift the vulva.

Her unwieldy creations incorporate plywood, plaster, caustic chemicals, sheets of copper, marbles, BBs and pearls. On forays to Home Depot, she debates whether to tell the employee in the orange apron that, yes, she needs exactly what she says she does because she is building a sex organ.

Howard wants her art to move beyond the rarified confines of a gallery. "I wish it could be set up and played at some bingo hall. Or (that I could) take it around to high schools as a sex education tool."

In a world where Viagra sales topped $1-billion a year while a record 400-plus anti-choice abortion measures were introduced in state legislatures, there are endless dichotomies for Howard's artful games.

Gender, she says, is ultimately about power. Reproduction is the one thing that separates women from men.

"When you are a woman, you realize you have a power, a major power. My work is about finding the balance between that power and . . . the skills and intellect you also need" to get what you want, to be who you are.

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