Eyewash@figureworks featuring paintings by Angela Wyman and Leslie Roberts January 4-February 4, 2002 168 North 6th Street, between Bedford & Driggs 1 block from the Bedford Stop on the L Train 718-387-2714 or 718-486-7021 Hours: Friday-Monday 1-6 or by appointment OPENING-Friday, January 4th 7-9   SD Yellow Feet (2001). 12" x 12", gouache ANGELA WYMAN's new "Super Deformed" series takes its title from the nomenclature of Japanese toys, denoting a category in which characters such as Godzilla or Bruce Lee are made cute and neotenous by swelling their heads to a 2:1 ratio in proportion to their body. They feature a conspicuous consumer, an Ornamental Personage wannabe and, lifted from the pages of Victoria's Secret catalog, a sassy woman strutting in an empowered way in super high-heels, a tantalizing source of ridicule and longing. The female-figure construct depicted in these works shuffles through a variety of exaggerated types: playful and unsettling, pointedly satirical and, at times, explicitly decorative. By twisting stereotypical topologies of the female form, aspects of female identity are examined, and the representation of women in our culture is questioned. The body becomes ground, the face becomes a mark and the specificity of the face is shadowed, obscured or tiny. This uneasy potential of beauty is advanced through playing with the elasticity and contortions of the human form. Technically, these works are achieved by alternating back and forth between freehand drawing and digital sampling and manipulation, a nearly endless process of recycling and reconfiguration. Through supercharging the space around these women with abstract bibelots, a byproduct of nervous doodling and disruption, their perfection is undermined and her role as both consumer and that which is consumed reinforced. A disturbance is created between what is illusionistically present and what is literally constructed with differing spatial zones sprinkled throughout. Angela Wyman lives and works in Williamsburg and has shown extensively in the neighborhood as well as in Manhattan and elsewhere in the U.S. and Europe. LESLIE ROBERTS' exhibition is comprised of small figurative works made out of found jigsaw puzzles of van Gogh's self-portrait, the statue of David and other art historical images, on which she does abstract paintings with the original images peeping through, and collages made from pictures of faces and other body parts clipped from magazines. Leslie Roberts has shown at Bill Maynes Gallery, the Painting Center and PPOW in New York City, as well as other venues throughout the US and Europe. EYEWASH, formerly located in an apartment in a turn-of-the-century residential building, is now a migratory gallery specializes in emerging and mid-career artists from Brooklyn and focusing on experimental exhibitions. eyewash will be having other exhibitions in 2002 at various sites in Williamsburg and Europe.