One artist's feminist mystique

Above: Tabitha Vevers's ''Flying Dream (The Bakery).'' Below: ''Lover's Eye: Eleonora (After Bronzino).'' (Kevin Thomas (above); DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park)

LINCOLN - The first Tabitha Vevers painting I ever saw stopped me cold: In it, a mermaid lay on her back on a rock, filleted. Her tail, sliced up the middle, revealed pink flesh and shards of fishbone. She held her arm over her eyes in despair. The sky, in gold leaf, crackled to reveal blood red beneath. It was gorgeously painted, violent, and almost too intimate to look at. The title: "When We Talk About Rape."

I saw it in a group show at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in 1993. Now the DeCordova has mounted "Tabitha Vevers: Narrative Bodies," a 20-year retrospective of work by an artist who uses the tropes and techniques of art history to tell cunningly contemporary yet timeless stories. It's the last show organized at the museum by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, the former DeCordova director of curatorial affairs.

Vevers, who got her bachelor's degree at Yale in 1978, was one of many artists of her generation who explicitly set out to correct an art-history imbalance of power between men and women, artist and model. In feminist parlance, models were objects of the male artist's gaze, and so the woman's perspective was not, traditionally, considered.

In the "Lover's Eyes" series, Vevers borrows a technique from late 18th-century England, when romantic partners carried paintings of their lover's eyes in lockets hidden in their clothing. The artist captures eyes from art history: "Mona Lisa" looks calmly at us from her honey-toned iris. This series doesn't reclaim the power of the model so much as redefine it. Many of these eyes don't gaze directly at us, but seem shy, or turned inward - even Mona Lisa. She's no less mysterious.

Vevers aims to paint a woman's experience from within. Mystery is part of the package. Her work extends beyond political and social discourse and consistently cuts to the emotional bone - literally, in the case of a series of scrimshaw pieces. The mythic narratives she portrays make violence, rapture, and despair palpable. She utilizes formats and materials historically associated with religious painting: Altarpieces and devotional works, the gold leaf and saturated tones of pre-Renaissance paintings all elegantly hold Vevers's personal mythologies.

The show begins with the "Secular Icons" series that includes "When We Talk About Rape." Fashioned after pre-Renaissance paintings and often set on wood shaped like altarpieces, they feature beleaguered and heroic figures. In "The Art of Survival" (1989), a barely clad woman wades toward us. She wears a crown, has an anchor tied around her neck, and bears a fat fish on her shoulders. Clearly, she has been on an oceanic hero's journey.

Vevers sets most of her paintings on or near the sea. The daughter of painter Tony Vevers, who died last year, and sculptor Elspeth Halvorsen, she grew up summering in Provincetown and has a home on the outer Cape. She sees the sea as elemental and feminine and the seaside as a place of transformation, a site of nourishment and peril.

She painted some of the "Flesh Memories" series in a studio at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the mid 1990s, around the time she met her now husband, artist Daniel Ranalli. These deftly made works fall flat. Vevers specializes in intimacy and usually works on a small scale. These pieces are larger, though not giant - the biggest is 45 x 60 inches - but they feature close-ups of torsos and explore issues of the flesh: desire, fertility. The artist outfits them as she might a shrine, with heavy-handed symbols: eggshells, vessels of blood and milk. They lack the crisp drama and delightfully enigmatic quality of her narrative paintings.

Characters, and the conflicts of their hearts, drive Vevers's better work. Scrimshaw pieces made in the late 1990s feature portraits of women who have wielded knives, from pickax murderer Karla Faye Tucker to Xena, Warrior Princess. With a knife, the artist carved their images into knife-shaped bones. This "Women & Knives" series conflates the weapon of the ag gressor and the flesh of the victim.

Vevers collected real dreams for her "Flying Dream" series, the most light-hearted work in the show, painted in the format of Mexican devotional paintings. Dreams are a stew of archetypes and personal mythology. Deliciously, we can only speculate what it means when a bikini-clad woman flies into a bakery, alarming the pastry chef, in the 2002 "Flying Dream (The Bakery)."

Dream imagery can seem nonsensical, and one of Vevers's great strengths is her willingness to go in directions that may make no sense. Giving dreams and fantasies form imbues them with meaning that may be more felt in the flesh than understood in the head.

For the "Shell Series," Vevers sanded shells she found on the beach and painted what they prompted, as if they washed up with these stories hidden inside. In the 2005 "Shell Series (Rapture)," a large clamshell holds the image of a lobster ravishing a woman. She throws her head back in ecstasy or exhaustion; the creature cradles her shoulder in its enormous claw. There's violence here, but also tenderness, and as with "When We Talk About Rape," the imagery's emotional nakedness rivets you, or causes you to avert your eyes.

Vevers's most recent group, the "Eden" series, reads more like post-apocalypse than like Genesis, with mutated figures. The first one, 2007's "Eden (Amoebayouba II.07a)," delivers a grotesque but sweetly conjoined Adam and Eve, a single figure with two heads and a variety of breasts and genitals.

Often, the landscapes in this group are sour with smoke. Global warming, genetic manipulation, and a poisoned environment may be the culprits for these horrendous scenes, but the characters, such as the many-breasted mother feeding her young in 2008's "Eden (Marsupedonna)," tenderly press on.

Vevers is not the first to portray 21st-century mutants, nor was she the first to plumb a woman's perspective. In that respect, she is another minnow swimming in a current of contemporary art as it reflects society. But her technique, her scholarship, and her generous vision, which embraces the complexities of personal pain, conflict, and desire, make for art that's provocative and deeply satisfying.