Gail Severn Gallery has devoted it’s largest gallery space to celebrate Women’s History Month. Artists in this exhibition use color as a predominate component of their artwork. Jenny Honnert Abell’s artwork is filled with fantasy and imagination. Loving nature, Abell’s imagery of birds on old book covers resembles the illustrations seen in early childhood fairytale books. Linda Christensen’s figurative paintings deal with life’s everyday occurrences. Her work features contrast of extremes in color and ambiguity of space. Pamela DeTuncq turns taxidermy into a playful and lively version of itself by using vintage tapestries. Using oils, knives, blowtorches, and waxes she formulates herself, Betsy Eby creates encaustic paintings as rhythmic compositions. The liveliness of Bean Finneran’s hand rolled ceramic sculptures resembles the creativity of nature. Focusing on painting as a space of exploration, Raphaëlle Goethals has used wax and resin as her signature medium for more than fifteen years. Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguished by for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. Suzanne Hazlett follows a ritual of adding and subtracting what may be twenty or thirty layers of color and material - her paintings arrive at the eventual visual and tactile end of their journey. Margaret Keelan’s ceramic sculptures of dolls / children and animals are both compelling and disconcerting. There is an immediate and visceral reaction to the heavily textured surfaces. Judith Kindler is an American multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, and photography-based mixed media works. Lisa Kokin’s sculptural collages, with a literary foundation of western novels, environmental and self-help books, are transformed with the addition of stitching and other objet trouvé to create intriguing story lines. Hung Liu’spaintings and prints often make use of anonymous Chinese historical photographs, particularly those of women, children, refugees, and soldiers as subject matter. Lynda Lowe paints poetic worlds with a power and a delicacy the blend imagination and intellect. Laura McPhee is known for her stunning images of the Northwest. Her trips to India bring us photographs rich in color and culture from the city of Calcutta and beyond. Alyssa Monksis blurring the line between abstraction and realism by layering different spaces and moments in her paintings.
Kenna Moser’s delicate work with beeswax, vintage envelopes, stamps and collaged pieces are filled with beauty and poetic statements. Kathy Moss is drawn to botanicals for their emotive and symbolic potential, for their mysteriousness and suggestiveness. Marcia Myers utilized color to capture the essence of her Italian experiences. Her paintings are relics of a creative process in which the act of creating supersedes the product of creation. Deborah Oropallo refines her artistic transition from painting to digital imaging by incorporating the multimedia of printmaking, photography, digital technology and painting. Jane Rosen transforms stone, bronze and glass into animals both domestic and wild. Her animals and birds of prey project grace and solitude. Anne Siems has gathered a large following of her youthful cast of animal and human characters, who celebrate the joys and mysteries of life. Kiki Smith’s tapestries address the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Mary Snowden meticulously stitched & embroidered animals from domestic farmyards and the wilds of nature. Working between logic and imagination, Julie Speidle’s newest work features bold colors matched with her iconic forms influenced by ancient artifacts. Allison Stewart has gained recognition for her mixed media paintings that express the restless balance between man and nature. Through stunning black & white portraits of rodeo riders, a six-man high school football team, and the Hutterites of Montana, Laura Wilson dramatically explores débutante tradition, border issues, isolation, poverty and other symbolic images of the American West.
