Nee-nee. Flash.

“A little more of the scared look,” she says to Lacy. “Keep your face like that. Yeah, yeah. Good.”

Nee-nee. Flash.

The film winds out.

“Relax, as much as you can.”

Lacy Cornish is not much relaxed. She is standing in a Waldo bakery. It’s late afternoon. The bakery’s closed. But through the big storefront windows, she is on display. Pedestrians stroll by, turn their heads. Five-feet-10 inches and made taller in spike heels, Cornish wears a black bra and a leather corset. A garter belt holds up sheer black hose. A black cat tattoo peeks through from her calf.

Cornish is Nicole Cawlfield’s model, a player in the photographer’s ongoing work.

Cawlfield has made her mark on the Kansas City art scene and elsewhere for her aggressive, staged photos, self-portraits and, lately, embroidered works that question conventional assumptions about contemporary life and sexuality.

At 33, she belongs to a young generation of artists and others who inherited the earnest, equal-rights assertions of feminism and changed them into an ironic, sexually charged social idea.

Cawlfield and others incorporate and transform pinup photos and erotica in work that offers “simultaneous doses of criticism and affection,” says art historian Maria Elena Buszek of the Kansas City Art Institute. The strategy makes some members of the earlier women’s movement nervous, but “third-wave feminists” like Cawlfield are remaking sexual iconography as a show of strength.

“Feminism,” Cawlfield says, “means the freedom to be who I am and explore who I want to be.”

Nicole Cawlfield stands just over 5 feet tall. Cat’s-eye glasses make an angular splash on her rounded face. She has small, animated hands.

Born in Oakland, Calif., she grew up in Colorado, daughter of a hardware salesman and a bank loan officer. Her father and grandmother painted and made ceramics, and she eventually found art more to her liking than calculus and the idea of medical school.

She graduated early from Pueblo (Colo.) High School, moved out of her parents’ house at 17 and rode her youthful rebellion to the Kansas City Art Institute.

“I was bored to death,” she says of high school and Pueblo, “and I couldn’t wait to grow up.”

Of her turbulent teen years, she says, “I’m still apologizing to my parents.”

In Kansas City she worked in restaurants, movie theaters and the art world. Nowadays she works as a photo stylist for Hallmark Cards. The job helps fund the art she makes in her studio and darkroom.

Most of Cawlfield’s work has involved not only sexuality but also gender identity and the “social construction of gender.”

She started making self-portraits as a way to think through how a two-dimensional plane of film can represent a person in all her complexities.

So, for example, she creates scenes of herself in various personae, much in the way the noted photographer Cindy Sherman has done, but often with a kind of Lucille Ball spin. In one recent photo she appears to balance some of women’s multiple roles.

“She’s vacuuming with a booty shaker on,” Cawlfield says, describing the black-and-white photo of herself that at that moment existed in a small version on a contact sheet. “There are burning cupcakes on the stove. She’s photographing it all and she’s on the phone.”

A recent signature piece is Cawlfield’s “Self-Portrait as Santa Lucia.”

Because it drapes a devotional scene in sexy garb, the photograph suggests a confrontation between her Catholic background — Lucia is Cawlfield’s patron saint — and provocative notions of sexuality.

“Patron saints are like therapists,” Cawlfield says, “and for me they were my first pinup girls.”

black booty call .The photo caused a brief stir two years ago when it landed on the wall of the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University. A priest objected, a campus debate ensued, the photo stayed up.

Among other things, Santa Lucia is the protector of eyesight, bearer of light. In the photo Cawlfield’s outstretched hand holds two eyeballs, a nod to traditional portrayals of Lucia and also a powerful metaphor for her own identity as a photographer.

But part of the story of Santa Lucia is her role as virgin martyr in fourth century Sicily. After she was identified as a Christian, pagan authorities tried to imprison her in a brothel, standard Roman empire punishment meant to break a woman’s moral spirit. She resisted and was executed.

To Cawlfield, Lucia and other saints represented ideal womanhood. They were graceful, beautiful and often persecuted, Cawlfield says, because they kept control of their sexuality.

“In some ways that’s what pinup girls really are.”

In the 20th century, so called pinup girls changed with the times. They evolved from pert office types to buxom, patriotic babes who baubled the noses of World War II fighter jets. In men’s magazines pinups became increasingly seductive and decreasingly clothed.

Yet even some of that historical cheesecake, Cawlfield and others argue, represented powerful expressions of female sexuality. Taken to extremes, as artist-exhibitionists such as Annie Sprinkle have done, the practice can descend into porn.

Fast forward to the bakery. Cawlfield calls the bondage photo of Lacy a “Thin-Up,” because of its emphasis on food and body image.

“She’s really beautiful, and she can’t eat all these really succulent things,” Cawlfield says. “She’s suffering for her beauty.”

“I wonder what Rose McLain would think of this?”

Patricia Campbell is co-owner, with her husband, Donald Peattie, of McLain’s, the longstanding family-style bakery on Wornall Road.

She’s watching as Cawlfield, makeup artist Sarah Thompson and propmeister Rachel McMeachin work with Lacy Cornish to arrange the shots.

“Stick your booty out, girl,” someone says to Cornish.

“That looks awesome,” Cawlfield says.

At one point, Campbell stands behind a counter 10 feet away. Elbow on the glass countertop, she rests her face on her hand and takes in the scene in her store. She seems mesmerized.

Later, she asks Cornish if she’s single. Maybe, Campbell tells her, she’d like to meet her son.

It’s a sunny spring Sunday, and Cawlfield, in a brown plaid shirt over blue jeans, is printing some of the frames of the Lacy shoot. Black and white, 16-by-20-inch photos. She’s thinking about pairing two of them. She’s not sure.

“I really like her facial expression,” she says. “It’s so comical. There’s so much going on. The cake is right at her face. Her eyes are wide. Like she’s saying I can’t get to it. It tells a story.

“I like an element of comedy in my work. To me this is the funniest. Her waist is small. You can tell she’s corseted. She cared about how her breasts look. Her arm covers them. I don’t want to show anything that makes her look bad or uncomfortable.”

The soundtrack in Cawlfield’s darkroom is all about women. Neko Case, Annie Lennox, Lucinda Williams, all the way from alt-country to seductive Julia Lee (“I Like It Like That”) and hip-hopper Missy Elliott. The soft, acrid aroma of developer and fixer tinge the close air.

Cawlfield has to stretch to reach the top of the Beseler enlarger. A red safelight casts a soft glow when she darkens the room and prepares to expose image on paper.

“Oooh, she’s tall,” Cawlfield says when the picture fills the space where the paper will go.

Pieta Brown on the boombox: “I want to be that girl.”

Her printing session has ups and downs. One frame seems too soft. After a few test strips, she decides she needs to refresh and replace chemicals.

“There’s not a guarantee,” Cawlfield says in the dark, flipping the cold-light enlarger on and off to burn another frame of Lacy onto paper, “but you get beautiful things every once in a while. Just like life.”