REVIEWS Gallery's final show: Himovitz shows 'World From a Gay Perspective' by Victoria Dalkey Sacramento Bee Art Correspondent A warning sign stopped visitors to the Michael Himovitz Gallery's exhibition, "The World From a Gay Perspective." Viewers under 18 will not be admitted to this show unless accompanied by an adult. The show deals in part in graphic terms, with a variety of aspects of the gay experience-from the whimsical erotica of James Kissel to Kerry L. Rutz's gripping images of brutal murders of gay men. Gallery owner Chuck Miller, who personally selected the works for the show, observes that the perspectives presented range from humorous to poignant to disturbing, with a good deal of pointed social commentary along the way. The exhibition is dedicated to Miller's late partner, Michael Himovitz, who died in September 1994. As The Bee reported Wednesday, Miller intends to close the gallery at the end of this show. "The fact that the exhibition is gay-oriented brings the concept of the gallery full circle, fro its humble but energetic beginnings in a construction trailer in the suburbs of Sacramento," He writes in the catalogue accompanying this exhibit. "Michael's entrance into the world of gallery ownership coincided with the reckoning of his sexuality and separation from his family and business. He bravely forged into a bold, new world following his passion as a gay man who held a love affair with contemporary art." In keeping with the mission Himovitz established for the gallery, the show is intended to educate, enlighten and inspire. Several things prompted Miller to produce the show. "It expresses my concerns from a political standpoint," he said. "We've had a lot of forward momentum over the past 10 years. But I wonder what will transpire given the present political circumstances. The Bush administration is dismantling so many things; I'm concerned about individual rights, the environment and legal issues. "I'm also concerned about the arts. One thing I've learned about art is that it has so much more power than television or film by virtue of its static nature. We have seen its power in the controversies over the Mapplethorpe exhibit and Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ'." Another reason for the show was the discovery of an unknown artist, James Kissel of Carmel, whose life story is being filmed for cable television by George and Laura Shirley, executive producers for Whimsey Productions. The Shirley's narrative of Kissel's abused and confined life will be partly filmed at the Himovitz Gallery and is scheduled to be shown on HBO at an undisclosed date. Kissel, also known as Jam'e, does lyrical, erotic illustrations of classical male nudes, with bulging, anatomically inventive musculature, executed with an obsessive meticulousness and colored with prima color pencils and ink in pastel colors. Like outsider art, his work has a naive innocence that gives it an unsettling charm. Since so many great artists throughout history, from Michelangelo to Andy Warhol, have been gay, the question arises: Why a show of gay art? How does this show differ from other shows? Miller doesn't posit a specifically gay art, but he feels the exhibition offers insights into what he describes as a kind of sixth sense that gay men have. "When you live under a system of repression, your intuition and sensitivity become heightened," he says. "To develop a level of comfort, a screening process comes into play, a kind of radar develops." Miller sees this special sensitivity as a survival mechanism developed over the long history of hostility toward homosexuality, which led to homosexuals in Nazi Germany being identified by a pink triangle sewn on their clothes, as yellow Stars of David were worn by Jews. One of the most poignant images in the show is a mixed media sculpture by Dan Pillers of San Francisco called "Remember Them." It takes the form of an oversized man's suite made of carpet batting with a pink triangle sewn over the left breast. The right side of the suit is imprinted with hurtful epithets that straight society applies to gay men. The suit hangs from steel pipes mounted with a showerhead, making you think of institutions settings - prisons, hospitals, the showers at concentration camps. The carpet batting - a rough, cheap material not meant to be seen - reminds one of hair shirts, hidden guilt and self-recrimination. It all adds up to a chilling piece that calls up associations with the Holocaust as well as the societal stigma gays face today. Kerry L. Rutz of San Francisco gives us works with a strong emotional impact as well. "Alabama, February 19,1999" depicts the horrendous murder of Billy Jack Gaither, who was beaten and then set afire on a pile of tires. In another large triptych, Rutz offers sequential images of the beating of Allen Schindler in a bathroom, each image becoming increasingly battered and flayed in an anguishing style reminiscent of Francis Bacon. They are wrenching works that ask us to acknowledge the continuing horror of man's inhumanity to man. Gary Epting paints large, dark, menacing, action-filled canvases of strife-torn scenes. In one, angry figures carry torches and makeshift weapons under a hellish spoof of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with giant balloons in the form of Popeye, Jesse Helms and monumental floating condoms. In another, a male nude is beset by baseball bat-wielding assailants as a cast of malevolent characters looks on. It all takes place in a drained swimming pool at night that might be a set from a Fellini movie. It's a disturbing and surreal scene in which the only ray of hope is a male figure climbing up a ladder to escape the impending violence. The show is not without a lighter side, though much of the humor involved is dark and edgy. Sacramentan Ken Siebert presents a series of paintings of crazed, rubbery figures acting out black comedies. With titles like "Adam and Steve" and "Giddy Fed Up Queers and Guns", they satirize the hypocrisy of politics, religion and commerce with gallows humor and cartoony verve. Gary Stephens, who lives in Florence, Italy, offers a witty, jarring surreal work that seems to symbolize the sixth sense to which Miller refers. It's a winged male figure covered with eyes like Argus, the all-seeing giant of Greek myth. A crowing rooster, symbolizing awakening, sits atop his head, and embedded in his chest is a globe of the world. Like a modern-day Orpheus, he holds an electric guitar in his hands and his truncated figure sits atop a Greek column. With its classical references and wry humor, it seems an apt symbol both of the sensitive artist and the wary gay man, who bring and outsider's perspective to both the external world and the world with in. Brett Kaufman combines humor and pathos in imaginative manipulated photos that pay homage to heroes such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. and comment painfully on discrimination against gays. The surreal images range from Roosevelt's face, made up of tiny images of the common people she fought for, and Vincent Van Gogh's, made up of sunflowers, chrysanthemums and iris to an image of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed into a vibrant Van Gogh painting. Homosexuals killed in the Holocaust are memorialized in a chilling image of death camp with huge flowers with human faces springing up over the barbed wire. Harder to categorize, except to say they are strong and compelling images, are the lush and haunting mixed-media works of San Franciscan Gregg Cassin and the enigmatic mixed-media paintings of Gary Viviano, a former Sacramento artist who now lives in Pekin, Ill. Cassin presents images that mix religious symbols, such as the crown of thorns and the sacred heart, and iconic haloed figures in long dresses that seem harrowed by suffering and transformed into saints. In "Still Here With My Memories," a photo of a young girl is surrounded by delicate, often submerged images of birds and sheet music in a painful yet joyous image of spiritual transcendence. Viviano's work, always strong, moves away from his previous visual diaries into a more personal realm of narratives set in mysterious domains. Adding and subtracting layers of pigments and using wax to build up his images, he gives us scenes in which male and female figures interact in landscapes and interiors that seem to emerge from layers of remembered visual stimuli. In "A Potential View," a photographic image of a boy's face decomposes in a thicket of forest that also suggests barbed wire, while a male figure spreads his arms in a posture suggestive of a crucifixion. In "Suspension," a female figure holds up a long stick in a room with billowing curtains and a blue chair while androgynous figures pose in the foreground. They are intriguing works the play with both visual and sexual ambiguities in compelling and sensitive ways. The show is rounded out by "Out of the Closet," an installation of gay erotica, memorabilia and ephemera in what was literally a closet in the gallery. Put together by Miller and his staff, it includes rare playbills from Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco, gay comic books, Raymond Pettibon's punk rock album covers and illustrations, and a book of male figure drawings by Southern California artist Don Bachardy. So, why a gay art show? How does the show differ from others? The answer may be that, like African American art or Chicano at or women's art, the art of gay people deals with experiences that are unique to their cultures. Gay bashing, both verbal and physical: the plight of gay "widows" who suffer the loss of their partners without the kind of support society affords straight widows: and other issues of concern expressed in this show are facts of life in the gay community, and gay artists bring a unique perspective to dealing with them.   Victoria Dalkey, "Gallery's final show; Himovitz shows 'World From a Gay Perspective'",THE SACRAMENTO BEE, Encore Section, 4/22/01, p.12-13.