Watching Juarez

Somehow it's an art-school cliché that political art is bad. We're often grateful to those who ignore such horseshit; at the moment, that artist is Bay Arean Ana Teresa Fernández, aka the girl with a rocket, since she's blowing up so fast. At "Ecdisis," she shows sculptural work, not her usual paintings. True to form, though, the result is somehow both abstract and severely political, even activist. The show focuses on the ongoing, unsolved murders of women in Juarez, Mexico. Fernandez went there and made molds of some of the dead women's orphans. She then lit the resulting little forms from within, covered them with broken glass, and leaned them against the wall or set them, hunched, on benches. You want to help them, but you're not sure how. The orphans are only one element; elsewhere, a large light box and etched mirrors also illuminate the issue.
Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: Nov. 26. Continues through Jan. 10, 2008