Visual Arts - Boy’s life

The five artists in The Man Show at the Georgia State University Gallery want you to feel their pain. But with its idiot box title and an opening night reception sponsored by Hooters featuring a keg of beer and hot dogs (get it?), the irony is that even as men try to shrug off gender stereotypes, society keeps forcing them to conform.

With one notable exception (artist Angus Galloway’s provocative, but non sequitur soundscape of MARTA’s distinct aural universe), the work in The Man Show consistently addresses feelings of masculine powerlessness.

A gloomy cloud of anxiety and insecurity hangs over much of the work. Jason Butcher’s animated short, “Regretfully Doing that Which Must Be Done,” has intimations of suicide and creates a general air of despondency (intensified by an atmospheric soundtrack) that matches up well with the fretful works on paper by Paul Rodecker. In Rodecker’s drawings and prints, male figures are often sketched as painfully flayed, their musculature turned inside out like medical school Supermen.

Like those ads in the back of comic books that promise to transform concave-chest nellies into brawny bohunks, Ryan Roth’s works are centered on male anxieties about physical strength. His bas-relief sculptures feature numerous self-portraits of the shirtless artist raising his fists in a “bring it on” gesture or flexing his muscles in the mirror. But rather than portraits of strength, Roth’s works imply feeble, neurotic fronting.

Some of the strongest and also most psychologically loaded work in The Man Show is Addison Will’s “Baby Series” of color photographs depicting the artist’s difficult adjustment to fatherhood. In every image, Will is bystander in his own life — sitting on an exam table while his wife talks to her obstetrician, splayed out like a teenage slacker on the couch while she pumps breast milk for their newborn. Will’s disconcertingly direct gaze into the camera captures the shell-shocked aspect of new parenthood, but with a particularly male twist. Yet despite his assertions of irrelevancy, Will is still the consummate daddy-with-a-camera, controlling the view and what will or will not be seen.

The Man Show runs through Aug. 6 at the Georgia State University Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery located at the corner of Peachtree Center Avenue and Gilmer Street. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat., noon-4 p.m. www.gsu.edu/artgallery. 404-651-0489.