She objects

By SUSAN ASCHOFF

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 18, 2000

[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar] Victoria Hirt cradles St. Martha, one of her recent creations on women’s persecution.

TAMPA -- Victoria Hirt records the wreckage of a sexist society.

In stark black-and-white photographs, the lens' gaze falls on women stripped of clothing, their body parts bandaged, their limbs twisted into torturous positions, their heads cropped out.

What at first appears benign, even humorous -- the pairing of a photograph of cow hooves with another of women's high heels -- becomes disturbing.

Domestication, Hirt calls the piece.

Recently, the 42-year-old has added words to her pictures. On a photograph of the naked torso of a woman, her arm in a sling, Hirt overlays text about St. Martha, the patron saint of housewives. Hirt puts the image, printed on transparent paper, under plexiglass in a black box and illuminates it from behind.

As if to shine a light on the unholy.

"We live in a society where women are perceived as objects," says Hirt. "The thread with me has to do with women and culture and society."

She has confronted the objectification of women since college. Then, she would arrange flowers and tools into still lifes, then project pictures from porno magazines onto the pairings and take photographs.

Victoria Hirt, untitled, gelatin silver print.

While in graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hirt found only a handful of female artists listed in the hefty art history books but a "gazillion" paintings of naked women. After moving to Florida in the mid-1980s, she appropriated these Renaissance women and projected their images onto palm trees and walls outdoors. Now distorted, their colors bleeding, the women were ready for Hirt's camera.

The show in Tampa includes work from Hirt's series Object Lessons, in which she juxtaposes intensely detailed prints of everyday objects and body parts. The soft pillow of a woman's buttocks sensually mimics a vase. Folds of skin and the hollow of a back copy the lines of a kitchen whisk.

There is humor in Hirt's visual matchmaking. But the vase pairing was inspired by a former lover whose abuse made Hirt feel she was a mere vessel, she says. The whisk could be a weapon, the hollow a gaping wound.

The women's heads are invariably edited, Hirt says, because society does not value their individual identity, only their role.

An art professor at the University of South Florida, Hirt grew up in Boston and misses the city, she says. She feels isolated here but suffers no artistic block. She envisions creating life-size, boxed photographs of women hinged like a Japanese screen. She dreams of casting 2,000 douche bags in glass, then hanging them over a block of text so the glass distorts the words. The text would read and repeat:

Cleanliness is next to godliness. A woman's work is never done.

Societal expectations have not completely spared men, she concedes in some of her work. A triptych titled Boys Toys shows a football, a man holding his penis, and a gun. In the Tampa show, a child's holstered six-shooter and a diagram of a biceps become Muscle.

Married and the mother of an 8-year-old son, Hirt says personal happiness will not mellow her strident statements. She notes the "ripped" male models in a Calvin Klein advertisement and says it may be time to put G.I. Joe in the frame with Barbie: Here's to sexual equality.

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