Ritualistically bound in dark twine, Kohout's winged creature displays pale, womanly thighs beneath her alien mein, like the desiccated remains of a nymph, maenad or fairy queen. In this, she is like a diviner who perceives the confluence of night and day, shadow and light, creation and decay, in uncanny constellations of salvaged objects. It seems that images are more flexible than words, which are so often constrained by conceptual logic. Words divide the world into this and that, which tends to become this or that, his or hers, black or white. Them or us.
Words specify differences while images indicate what is seen , either visually or in the mind.
This is a more universal perspective than most verbal concepts. Kohout's Mute says much without the restriction of words. In contrast to the sometimes rigid feminist dogmas of the past, the new women's art often seems to blur the hard edges found in traditional rhetorical arguments. On the walls, Alisha Young's fantasy paintings epitomize the diversity of the new art in work that might have scandalized earlier feminists. Many evoke fantasy or science fiction as well as the soft eroticism of Olivia, Vargas or Virgil Finlay, at least at first glance.