Nov 11, 2005  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

VERY BUTCH lesbian, feminine gay man and transgendered person has at one point overheard someone asking the question “Hey, is that a boy or a girl?” Sometimes, it’s an innocent question and sometimes it’s an aggressive taunt.

No matter the motive behind the words, the question is often posed by someone looking to lash out against those who don’t adhere to societal gender norms.

Beginning Nov. 4, a group of artists is posing the gender question in an exhibit titled “Hey, Is That a Boy or a Girl” at the Warehouse Theater and exhibition space. It will run through Dec. 4 and is peppered with special events, including poetry readings, concerts, a film screening and a gender burlesque show.

“I find gender is something that kind of pokes at us,” says Ruth Trevarrow, 46, one of the co-curators of the show who says she’s been nursing the idea of a gender art exhibit for 15 years.

Trevarrow first got the idea to curate a gender show after seeing the play “Hidden Agender” by transgendered playwright Kate Bornstein.

“Here are these queer, faggoty, lesbian, transgendered people performing this bizarre way-out piece at George Mason University. Even this queer dyke artist was challenged by gender stuff,” Trevarrow says of herself.

Her self-professed love of D.C. queer artists led her to put together an extensive collection of multi-media works and performances intended to question viewers’ preconceived notions about gender.

UPON ENTERING THE Warehouse exhibit, patrons are quickly transported into a world where the socially acceptable polarity of male and female is turned upside-down.

A large painting of a man robed in the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe nearly dominates the first room.

The traditional Guadalupe imagery is full of gender assumptions and challenges. The Catholic mother of Jesus is depicted standing on a crescent moon, a long-time feminine symbol embodied in Greek and Egyptian mythology. She eclipses the shining sun, a typically masculine symbol.

In the standard depiction, she inhabits and transcends both the masculine and the feminine. The painter of this new work takes this idea one step further by putting a man into Mary’s place. S/he looks on benevolently, close to the entrance, inviting visitors to reexamine not only how they view the masculine and feminine, but gender roles in religion as well.

The “Lady” in the Guadalupe painting is actually a self-portrait by the exhibit’s co-curator, Richard Kightlinger.

A selection of works from the exhibit ‘Hey, Is That a Boy or a Girl?,’ an examination of gender issues by gay artists, showing at the Warehouse gallery space through Dec. 4:

trong class="textlight">Samson Huang’s ‘Five Faces.’

In reviewing the variety of works, Kightlinger, 43, says, “I have found [the works] involve the blending of gender. We are all people with the same feelings and emotions, and gender really does not play into that.”

Kightlinger, who is gay, says there isn’t a link between gender and sexuality.

“[People] are very much like a flower. We all have male and female parts, and so I am just attracted to the male part of the flower,” he says.

Next to the Lady of Guadalupe are two photos of lilies, one of the sacred flowers of the Madonna cult — the religious figure, not the pop icon. Each flower is gaping wide with stamens heavily pixilated and standing straight out from the heart of the blossom. The flower, containing both male and female sexual characteristics, becomes a metaphor for the entire exhibition.

John Borstel’s ‘Stillborn’

LOCAL GAY ARTIST Jim Adams doesn’t just create pictures of lilies. He has an installation that takes up an entire room at the exhibit and questions gender in atypical ways.

In the center of the room is a black box with silver clasps, and on the lid sits two jars filled with a yellowish-looking liquid. Submerged in the liquid of each jar is a single Japanese figurine, stripped of all paint and reduced to a white finish. The figures are two children, one boy and one girl.

A soundtrack of distorted urban rhythms and fractured speech and melody plays in the background as part of the installation. Black arrows are placed against two walls of the room, and four copper equilateral crosses are nailed to the floor, one on each side of the box.

At times, a watery piano sound dominates the soundtrack, and it’s easy to get ...