Which are you: a feminine heterosexual, a masculine heterosexual, a feminine homosexual or a masculine homosexual? Is there more to you than a single one of these four permutations includes?

These are among the questions that artists Jessica Walker and Cyane Tornatzky ask in the exhibit “Repetitious Antics,” currently on display at Serra House as part of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research’s Art at the Institute initiative.

The exhibit includes six collections. “Holes” is a series of photographs in which a female hand reaches into an opening — of a mailbox, a drainage pipe and a hole in the ground, among others. This female penetration, says curator Karen Rapp’s write-up of the piece, is “as absurd as it is temporarily empowering.”

Humor is a key element in Walker and Tornatzky’s work; their “Aerobics for Assimilation” series is cuttingly hilarious, recommending to women in business such exercises as “Bending under the glass ceiling ... Flat back and arm extension”:

“This position may cause some strain, but if you practice throughout the work day you will quickly become more and more accustomed to bending under your invisible barrier. This exercise aids in curving ambition in women and allows corporate America to function as it always has.”

Part of their satire’s impact hinges on the suggestion of what we all, male and female, lose when gender becomes an all-or-nothing proposition. “Gender Stereoptics,” which invites, “Please select a stereotype from the options above,” uses an outdated medium to show up rigid stereotypes and how they restrict both women and men.

“eScapes: Technology Landscapes” addresses the blurring boundary between technology and the natural world: CD-Rs poke out of sand dunes and electrical cords slither through plants in Walker’s disconcertingly dreamy, saturated photographs.

Finally, “Quilt for Grandmother’s Journey” and “Picket” deal with Walker’s Appalachian origins, which she shares with Tornatzky. In “Quilt,” she digitally stitches together images of coal mines and jewelry in a self-aware use of the pattern her forebears brought into their own, fabric quilts. “Picket” depicts a line of white crayons as a picket fence, but each of these crayons is labeled with a different racial epithet often applied to Appalachians, such as “yokel,” “hick” and “redneck,” showing that whiteness is a racial category we create and use like any other.

Walker and Tornatzky’s work uses humor and intelligence to address gender, technology and race, making for a highly enjoyable as well as thought-provoking time seeing their work first-hand.

If you have your own artistic work on gender issues, would like to win $300 and have your work exhibited at the Institute in the Spring 2007 Student Art Show, contact curator Karen Rapp (kmrapp@stanford.edu) for more information. Submissions are due on Friday, March 2.

“Repetitious Antics” will be on display weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, facing Florence Moore Hall, until March 23, 2007. The Institute is online at gender.stanford.edu, as are artists Jessica Walker at JessicaWalker.net and Cyane Tornatzky at creative.cyanowski.com.