Nurses and Queens

In an Art Access preview for Elizabeth Jameson’s current show of drawings and sculpture, the prolific local artist is compared to Miranda July, but I think she resembles another artist even more accurately: “Enough of sweetness, women need to get out there and fight again,” said Miuccia Prada backstage at a Milan fashion show last fall. The Associated Press reported that for the first season since 9/11, designers were ready to move on from frilly, distracting fashion, back to more utilitarian styles. And Prada led the charge, with outfits made from tough wool and fur, in shapes sometimes mimicking armor. Jameson’s artwork reminds me of the way Prada (a former Communist, mime artist, and political science Ph.D) plays with ideas of identity and responsibility through the constructs of fashion. Jameson’s “Nurses and Queens” theme continues a preoccupation with costume and “the feminine expression of both strength and vulnerability,” shown in tiny fur dresses and crowns adorned with safety crosses, and illustrations of 18th-century silhouettes wearing gas masks. Who knows what’s underneath their bustles? The installation Keeping Up Appearances, a fortress of cakes surrounding an armored woman and made from 300 pounds of frosting, here reprises its 2006 Bumbershoot showing. Jameson has many avenues where she can continue the conversations prompted by her visual art, including her all-girl band the Buttersprites and in costume design for the Degenerate Art Ensemble. In a recent New York Times Magazine, Prada cautioned against living in a fantasy-world through fashion. “Live with the sense that there is a larger world around,” she urged. Through an almost-plain but enormously compelling visual language, Jameson seems to do just that. Ballard/Fetherston Gallery 818 E Pike, 322-9440 , http://www.ballardfetherstongallery.com, Daily from Tue., May 8 until Sat., June 2