miriam bohemia | reviews

The Vancouver Courier
Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Prostitute paintings have Cold War twist

By Peter Tupper
Contributing writer

Miriam Bohemia - who spells her name without capital letters- was only two years old when she left her native Czechoslovakia with her family in 1968, after the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded, forcing Czech intellectuals to flee. She grew up in Montreal, but frequently travelled to her homeland as she grew up, letting her observe the fall of communism and the coming of global capitalism, and the splitting of Czechoslovakia into two States.

When she would visit her grandmothers in their small town near the German-Czech border, she increasing saw scantily clad women lined up along the roadside during the day, selling themselves to motorists. The women were Slovaks, Russians, Ukrainians and Romanians, often well educated but stranded, geographically and economically, after their promised jobs or visas or husbands never came. Often in the country illegally, they lived underground with no papers.

Most of their clients were men from prosperous Germany and Austria, touring a nation where their hard currency let than live like kings and have their pick of women (or girls, or boys).

These real-life women became the inspiration for Women's Kapital, a series of full-length depictions of sex workers and using symbolic backgrounds drawn from Cold War history. In one, the old USSR flag is crushed beneath a pink tank- a reference to an invading tank which was painted pink by Prague art students during the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Some of the women in bohemia's paintings wear Red Army officer's caps and pose before Soviet, Russian and American flags; a post-communist kitsch informed by the Cold War and its aftermath. The paintings themselves, with their solid blocks of bold color and idealized figures, suggest Soviet propaganda posters.

The women depicted are sexy at first glance, their impressive figures painted with lush flesh tones, but then you notice their red eyes and fixed grins. However, bohemia emphasizes, "These women are not completely victims." Her subjects return the viewer's gaze or look away with bored indifference, and seem more challenging than submissive. There is an uneasy tension between their bold postures and the vulnerability of their near-nudity.

The question bohemia's work poses is this: where does authentic female desire belong between the extremes of communist de-sexualization and capitalist over-sexualization?

This question is far from academic for bohemia. After completing her Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Ottawa, she "had a really hard time with art in terms of what it wanted to talk about, and who its audience was. I felt that it was really insular and ivory tower-ish. I floundered for a few years, and [then] I slowly started focussing on this topic."

After university, bohemia worked as a front-line advocate for poor and homeless people, as well as prostitutes' rights. "I've always been really torn about that kind of pragmatic work versus doing art, [but] the more I did that, the more I missed doing art. I realized there has to be a place for it. And also, once I started to understand corporate globalization and its effect on society, I started believing in art more. It's really important that artists continue to make subversive art because otherwise wise the only thing out there is media and advertising."

Her paintings are intended to have a distinctly Czechoslovakian sense of irony. When bohemia was born, Czechoslovakia was supposed to be "socialism with a human face." In her lifetime, it has gone from a utopian dream to a grim reality, and has wound up a state split in two and struggling under global capitalism.

bohemia says she has only begun to explore this material, and plans many more paintings in the series. She is mindful of the irony of trying to communicate a political message with paintings selling for $2,000 or more.

"I'm aware of the limitations that painting and visual art have in terms of what audience it speaks to and who chooses to come to a show. I wouldn't say that it is activism."