If the point of Women’s History Month is to highlight women’s stories, AVA Gallery and Art Center is doing its bit.
While most of the artists the nonprofit visual art center will exhibit this year are women, the current set of exhibitions showcases four artists who are making art with women in mind.
“These artists are all working within similar ideas and themes,” Samantha Eckert, AVA’s exhibitions director, said this week.
The four artists range in age and medium, from Danielle Klebes, a New Hampshire native now living in New York’s Hudson Valley who’s a decade out of college, to Ann Young, a Barton, Vt., artist who had a decorated career in ceramics before switching over to painting 20 years ago. Joining them are Rachel Montroy, of Hopkinton, N.H., and Olivia Janna Genereaux, both of whom are in the middle passage.
Montroy’s mixed media sculptures are the most overtly feminine. They’re made of wool and found materials, such as sea shells, echo natural forms but the reverberation is distorted into something supernatural. As Montroy puts it in a statement, she likes to “combine elements of the known and the unknown.”
Some of those elements evoke female anatomy, much as Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers do, but the forms are gentler, more alien, bulbous. They brought to mind the odd and uncanny cartoons of Gahan Wilson and Sam Gross, who also rendered nature in a fun-house mirror.
Klebes’ show is titled after one of her paintings, Midnight Adventure Club. That painting alone is worth a visit to AVA. A crew of people is floating down what looks like a bayou or gentle river. In the foreground is a woman on a tube. Her head is tilted back and she stares out of the frame at the viewer upside down. Everyone else in the painting, all men, appear to be staring at her, including a dog in a canoe.
There’s a lot to see in this photographic moment, from the central figure, who appears utterly at ease, and the other figures, who don’t, to Klebes’ way with paint, which is fluid and masterful. Much of the rest of Klebes’ work at AVA reflects on the dissociation of being an individual in a crowd.
A teacher at AVA, Genereaux revels in the physicality of painting. The title of her show, “Unabashed Joy,” refers not to the feeling produced by the art in the viewer, but in the feeling of the maker in the moment of making. Genereaux refers in a statement to the “dance-like process” of her painting practice.
The resulting paintings are all on square canvases, that most formal of shapes. Almost all of them include a boxy, abstract form that seems to hem in the energy put into it. Though each of the paintings is titled Unabashed Joy and a number, they aren’t particularly unabashed or joyful, and at least one, No. 8, contained dark forms that seemed menacing. But that’s not the point.
It’s no secret that we live in troubling times, and that’s what Young’s paintings are all about. While many diseases have been eradicated, global poverty has been much diminished and most Americans live in unprecedented peace and prosperity, there are threats lurking around every corner.
The coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the Jan. 6 violence, ongoing racial strife, creeping autocracy around the world — all of it has combined to foster a deep unease. Ann Young has been painting such scenes for years. The works in her show, titled “In Dangerous Times,” reflect how global horrors are visited on women and girls.
Her take on Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners might seem a bit on the nose, but it’s enjoyable. Where the three women in Millet’s justly famous 1857 painting gathered the slim pickings left after harvest, Young’s toil in a field of plenty — plenty of garbage. Instead of hayricks behind them, a nuclear power plant’s stacks exhale into the sky. Millet was taking an idealized look back at the rural peasantry before the Industrial Revolution, and Young is looking back at what we’ve reaped since then.
Of course, it isn’t all bad news for women, and Young considers that, too. In Though She Be But Little, She Is Fierce, a girl looks out from the canvas along with a snarling wolf and a screaming hawk. Some of the magic of the title’s Shakespearean language rubs off.
While the paintings of troubled times possess a certain power, a few smaller portraits showcase Young’s ability to evoke emotion without all the terror in the background.
All the shows are on view through April 15. Montroy is scheduled to give talk about her work and demonstrate needle felting from 2 to 4 p.m. April 2, and Klebes will give a gallery talk from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., also on April 2. Genereaux will give a gallery talk from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. April 8.
AVA also is showing a video featuring interviews with the artists. You can scan a QR code in the galleries to watch it on your phone, or watch it on a monitor, but it’s also on YouTube.
