There aren’t many cowgirls in Jersey City. But probably everyone in Jersey City has an idea about what a cowgirl is like. A cowgirl is strong, resilient, direct, and perhaps even righteous. He is nobody you want to mess with, lest you mess with a ribbon or threaten with cold lead. That those of us inexperienced in the open range have a feeling for the cowgirl is a testament to the suggestive power of images in film and television. The archetype appeals to those of us who are attracted to powerful women who are no fools.
This is a safe bet Jersey City artist Cheryl Gross, who teaches at Pratt, doesn’t spend much time rustling cows. The cowgirls that punctuate his multimedia pieces are indebted to Westerns, television films and cartoons, popular representations of urban country children, and his own colorful imagination. “BoxingBabes and Cowgirls,” a show of her latest series of photographs on view at the Lemmerman Gallery at New Jersey City University (2039 Kennedy Blvd., Hepburn Hall) throughout Women’s History Month and through April 12, is rich in allusions in cowgirl mythology and pure frontier schtick. In these colorful and fast paintings on paper, we are shown two town boys outside the Cowgirl Motel, a hollow guitarist in a red bandana preparing to deliver something worthy of fire, a woman mounted with six- and seven(!) shooters pointed at the audience, and women in wide-brimmed hats, Stetsons and the like, going on for days.
We’re also introduced to some actual girls from American history — or Gross’s deeply personal interpretations of those girls. Among the real people is Stagecoach Mary, a freed slave who became a pioneer postwoman in nineteenth-century Montana. Working from vintage photographs, the artist gives Mary and her neighbors the Cheryl Gross treatment: fields of bold color, parallel lines of ink and cross-hatching that focus directly on the image, a salt-and-peppering of dots, inspirational quotes placed in the body of the work, muscular sense of motion and mission, and illustrative crispness and narrative certainty reminiscent of movie posters, postcards, classic cowboy imagery from dime novels, and vintage pop album covers . Nellie Brown, a turn-of-the-century cowgirl immortalized by a famous shot in which she looks tougher than her draft horse, also makes an appearance. Bessie Herberg, the early twentieth-century cowgirl turned entertainer and frontier popularizer, and Happy, her mount, arrive at NJCU in a wild splatter of orange pigment. Gross’s subjects always seem to explode in front of the frame, shattering an imaginary surface into colorful splinters and shards. It’s a bit of show-womanship that Herberg, and perhaps even Stagecoach Mary, might appreciate.
Sometimes these glass ceilings are shattered by the force of personality that Gross can summon through posture and facial expression. Sometimes more force than that is needed. The cowgirls of the Lemmerman show share wallspace with red-gloved pugilists: female fighters who throw huge fists into the two-dimensional confines of their paper boxing rings. Gross seems particularly constrained by their red gloves, which are depicted as twin threats, dominating the frames, mediating the distance and defining the relationship between the subject and the viewer. The actor’s boxers, like his cowgirls, are probably alluring. They had color in their cheeks and beautiful, well-balanced features, and everything about their faces and bodies broadcast immediacy. “BoxingBabe 34” throws a haymaker but remains poised and confident, with just the whiff of a smile adorning her unfazed face. A dagger-like tail that just came out of the back of his head. His eyebrows were a pair of black razors.
There is no such boxer in real life. Can’t have. Boxing is too brutal for such chiseled immobility. The number 34 stands for female determination and the furious force of an empowered woman; he is as much a symbol as he is a person. Gross makes sure all of his characters are physically compelling, even if they aren’t conventionally beautiful. Action Girl’s erotic charge is a huge part of her project and her message, and her sure-handed technique ensures that most of her punches land hard.
The artist is probably well known for his arresting pictures of endangered animals, and many of the same visual elements he used to create a sense of danger and vulnerability are present here: manic shading, storytelling intensity, warning-light-bright colors, and an overwhelming sense that the role is too small to contain its subjects. But these cowgirls and warrior women are not on anyone’s protected species list. Gross made sure they could stand, and survive, on their own. His admiration for the strongwomen he developed is the most prominent feature of “BoxingBabes and Cowgirls.” These women possessed the qualities he wanted to see. More than that, they were the women he clearly wanted to be. Call it a feel-good show, rich in prototypical American imagery, from an irrepressible feminist artist who pours herself into every thrown ribbon and right hook.