GRAPHIC DETAILS: CONFESSIONAL COMICS BY JEWISH WOMEN at the Gladstone (1214 Queen West), to April 17. 416-531-4635. Rating: NNN
From Superman and Mad Magazine to Maus, Jews have played a big role in comics. Now, British artist Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer, a writer for New York English/Yiddish newspaper the Forward, have curated Graphic Details, a touring show brought in by the Koffler about Jewish women’s contributions to the once male-dominated form.
The artists are from Britain, the U.S., Canada and Israel, their styles ranging from sketchbook diaries to funnies-type strips. Nonconformists all, each tells a unique tale about growing up Jewish, love lives queer and straight, childbearing and miscarriage, the Israeli army, 70s women’s liberation or gross-out humour.
The show has four rooms: It’s Not You, It’s Me, with pioneers Sharon Rudahl and Aline Kominsky-Crumb alongside more recent first-person practitioners like Vanessa Davis and Toronto’s Sarah Lazarovic Chosen Schmosen, about visiting Israel and serving in the IDF, plus Corinne Pearlman’s comics about Jewish London and this show Oy Gevalt, expressions of angst like local artist Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was A Child Of Holocaust Survivors and Diane Noomin’s miscarriage tale and Sh*t Happens, turd stories, plus Racheli Rottner’s Kafkaesque relationship with a bug.
I found works that use a less cartoony, more draughts(wo)manly style most satisfying, like Lightman’s pencil drawings from her visual diary and Eisenstein’s expressive ink-and-wash illustrations. I’d love to see more from Ilana Zeffren, who has a few small pencil drawings here and has published books in Hebrew that depict her own and public queer life in Israel. Translation, please.
Though it’s interesting to see the artists’ originals, with their blue-pencil sketches, comics are meant to offer a page-turning experience. An exhibit can only show fragments of narrative: a lot of reading without the usual payoff.
But for fans of the medium, this won’t pose a problem.
art@nowtoronto.com
