‘Inked Hearts’ likes it natural

SUZANNE SHIFFLETT “SELF PORTRAIT”

Public intellectual Mark Dery called them urban aboriginals—those San Franciscans who reacted to the Tom Wolfe/Bret Easton Ellis go-go ’80s by replacing chiffon neck bows and mannish suits with neck bolts and labial studs, their skins (and septums) their canvasses. It’s a good term, Dery’s, as all his terms are, but I prefer simplicity (sometimes). I call them lesbians.

Suzanne Shifflett’s “Inked Hearts” at Flazh!Alley Studio in San Pedro is a lovely show of softened realist works, untitled portraits of her friends and the customers she’s tattooed. While the style is realist, the subjects are too: the men are nude (and often uncut), while the women are topless and true, their breasts strong and heavy and their bellies round as plums. These are the women you don’t see in LA much—at least unclothed—but who make up the sexy in places like Portland and Seattle (and San Fran), where a rounded bum or belly and solid thighs don’t mean you’re not a saucy wench.

The most striking of the portraits was of a gray-haired woman, a San Francisco activist and writer. Her eyes are soft and intelligent, her skin is marked with symbols, and her naked breasts are heavy but not pendulous. She is on the far side of middle age, and yet she has matching barbells through her nipples. I came back to her again and again on the wall where she hung next to a young bald lady with lots of teal and violet inking up her arms and chest. The young bald lady was not nearly so comfortable in her tattooed skin as the older woman, who’d probably posed for any number of counterculturals in her time. Instead, the bald woman looked not at Shifflett—her partner, according to gallery owner Joe Flazh—as she painted her, but up and to the side. On the other side of Shifflett’s shy girlfriend is a slim, foxy brunette with a long slinky ponytail and sideways eyes. It’s more like an old-timey boudoir painting than any of the other portraits, which aren’t really aiming for sex appeal but for knowledge. The foxy one, of course, is already sold. In Southern California, there’s always accounting for taste.

Flazh!Alley, on a taqueria’d stretch of Pacific in San Pedro, is a tidy shrine to erotic art, all wood floor/brick wall/upstairs crow’s nest loft space, just as it should be. If you look for the address on Pacific, you won’t find it; you have to enter, appropriately, from the rear. Despite the full and partial nudity on display, though, “Inked Hearts” is not erotic, not come-hither, not splayed. It’s more about the bones through people’s noses (and the nipple rings) than about sex per se. It’s about nudity as honesty, not nudity as foreplay.

It’s also about the canvasses that are the people themselves, the urban aboriginal tribe and how they adorn themselves. Surprisingly, Shifflett doesn’t seek to slavishly re-create her tattoos in the paintings. They’re more impressionistically rendered than the people on whom they appear: there are swaths of color, yes, and the outlines of designs. But the tattoos themselves are more felt than shown. The nipple rings, though, couldn’t be more real, with the glint of light on metal until you can almost feel them piercing your own tender pieces.

“INKED HEARTS” FLAZH!ALLEY STUDIO | 1113 S PACIFIC AVE | SAN PEDRO 90731 | 310.833.3633 | FLAZHALLEYSTUDIO.COM | OPEN BY APPOINTMENT AND FOR THE SAN PEDRO ART WALK DEC 6

Tags: flazh!alley, nudes, San Pedro, visual art