Something About The Girl AT BERNARD TOALE GALLERY

Something About The Girl, now at the Bernard Toale Gallery, takes a refreshing look at the life of female identity in photography. Curator Julien Tomasello rightly chose to include a single piece (or series) by each of the seven artists represented, making the show an intimate dialogue between the pieces. Among the four men and three women photographers are two of my favorites, David Hilliard and Francesca Woodman. Also represented is Linn Underhill, who uses herself as her own model. She dresses up to look like a debonair of the late '40s, reversing the concept of drag queen to drag king. A portrait of a doll leg by David Levinthal, who takes large-format Polaroids of collectable fetish dolls, is included. A similar interest in surrogate female forms is found in Chris Komater's piece "Turner" (a reference to the film star Lana Turner), an assemblage of 24 photos of a blond wig. But one piece in particular-"Nudes to the Nth," a series of black-and-white images by a female artist called Mardozo-demands attention. To create the photographs, Mardozo, now in her seventies, uses a pin-hole camera called an Omniscope. The Omniscope is peculiar in that it takes pictures on the inside of cylindrical pieces of film, distorting and stretching the images. The results are astounding. Mardozo's nude self-portraits are veritable fleshscapes in which body parts ooze up and into each other. They are at once ancient, even familiar and at the same time terrifyingly alien. In some ways Mardozo's work is less concerned with the problematic relationship between artistic representation and the female form than the other pieces in the show. "Nudes to the Nth" leaves behind identifiable femininity for a rich, mysterious world where skin is no longer an indication of human presence, let alone female presence. This transcendence, oddly, seems to me a wonderfully non-feminine, un-self-conscious ideal. It bodes well for the time when artists like Cindy Sherman will be set aside and people will ask deeper questions about what it means to be female.

Something About The Girl is on view at the Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., Boston, through Dec. 23. For more information, call 482-2549.