Sphinx Chapel, Installation view at P.P.O.W. 1996 Olympia, 1995 Friar Tuck, 1995

judy fox at p.p.o.w. by Mia Fineman In her installation Sphinx Chapel at P.P.O.W., Judy Fox intimately explores the riddle of the child's body as a meeting point of the erotic and the divine. Modelled in clay and naturalistically painted in delicate pink and brown casein, Fox's life- sized figures of naked children have the fleshy physicality of Duane Hanson sculptures combined with the subtly subversive sexuality of Sally Mann photographs. Each of the seven figures (ranging from chubby toddlers to barely blooming prepubescent girls) represents a different heroic or mythological character, indicated through an economical cultural shorthand of pose, gesture, and hairstyle. Two toddlers-- a solemnly introverted Dying Gaul and a beatific Friar Tuck with a monk's fringe encircling his bald pate--welcome the viewer into the front alcove. In the main gallery, a pig-tailed Attila aims an invisible bow and arrow at a juvenile Chinese Courtesan , frozen in a seductive and intricately stylized gestural dance. An angelic, blond-ringletted Delilah and a puerile Olympia, one hand coyly draped over her bare pubis, lounge silently at the sidelines. Presiding over the group with a hieratic nobility is the Sphinx, a young girl with her back arched at an impossible angle, her arms thrown back in a kind of benediction, her blond pigtails terminating in horn-like points. While each figure seems plucked from its own private universe, they are linked to each other through a paradoxical blend of humanity and heroicism, vulnerability and worldliness. Judy Fox Sphinx Chapel April 25 - May 25 1996 P.P.O.W. Mia Fineman is a New York writer.