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Two years ago the dA highlighted six male artists in
their “New Traditionalists” show—and
now, Jaclyn Dierking and Terry Taylor Castillo have created
an incredible companion exhibit under the same name, this
time featuring six exceptional women artists who embody
the ideal of paying reverence to the Renaissance Masters
while incorporating modern pop culture and contemporary
landscapes into their work.
Yolanda Gonzalez’s brilliant series of four nudes
painted on wood pallets highlight the direct connection
between the tools of creating art and art itself –
almost suggesting that the images that eventually emerge
from an artist have already been imprinted into the invisible
world, even into the objects we handle, and are simply
waiting for an inspired hand to pluck them out.
Transporting a traditional figure into a darkly playful
realm, Athena Hahn’s “gameboards” triage—Balloon,
Candyland and Chutes and Ladders—focuses on the
unspoken language in what should be a merry moment in
time. On the “surface,” we see a woman under
stormy skies letting fly a red balloon, or a girl contemplating
squares in Candyland, and yet these figures are obscured
by foregrounds of text, streaming thoughts, perhaps even
song lyrics, that seem to dim the shine on the day of
innocence. Susan Joseph also highlights text in her moody,
monochromatic visions of smoky birds flying through and
dissolving random letters into symbolic clutter.
Joy McAllister’s majestic landscapes, Reflection
and Emerging, implore us to delicately scale nature’s
pure spirit, and Gina Stepaniuk’s blue-green seaweed-like
The Shape of Things floats us into the calming, yet unpredictable
waters of a world in constant motion.
Finally, there are Leslie Brown’s women, sassy,
brassy redheads engaged in chatter and mischief, living
it up in worlds composed entirely of themselves and their
connections to one another—which seems like a wonderful
place to live, indeed.
“The New Traditionalists” at the dA Center
for the Arts, 252 S. Main St., Pomona, (909) 397-9716;
www.dacenter.org. Thru Jan. 30. Free.
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