Ream

From 1963 to 1964, Lee Lozano took hardware—screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches—as her pictorial focus. Here, Lozano takes a reamer (a device used to drill holes) as her subject. Ensconced in a male-dominated art world, Lozano preyed on the provocative connotations of tools to poke fun at the chauvinistic climate in which she found herself. The artist manipulated and anthropomorphized her subjects to imbue them with new (often humorous, sexualized) meaning. At the same time, the sci-fi quality of these mechanized images tapped into the popularity of science fiction at that time— in art historian Helen Molesworth’s words, we might think of Lozano’s tool paintings as “cyborg fantasies of a complete merger of body and machine.”