The Rosen Women, exhibit reviewed by Debora Alanna

 

Hinda Avery’s billboard sized paintings proclaim a resistance to war, to the Jewish persecution and decimation in the Holocaust or “The Shoah” ([1]), confronting the repercussions of another and very different time and place than we in British Columbia presently experience. With a series of photographically documented wartime events that are reclaimed and reconsidered through buoyant optimism, Avery advances the approach of and need for collective female resistance to the protracted outcome from the Holocaust calamity. The work exhibits actions that combat the oppression of morale, showing how to withstand and counteract the long-term effects of the tyranny and murder of about 7.3 million European Jews at the hands of the Nazis ([2]) and help generations’ consideration to follow. Avery’s work counters the enduring harmful influence of this World War ll slaughter and residual heed to Nazis’ measures by painting the largess of campaigning women that are colourfully strong and infectiously cheerful - familiar and familial.

The Rosen Women upholds and fosters decisive denotations of female resistance fighters. Utilizing photographic portraits, Avery reconstructs the document images onto her canvases. She substitutes her female family’s faces on these painted compositions, keeping the original stance of people experiencing the processing prior to the genocide and on soldiers preparing for war. Additionally, Avery accentuates the women’s features with enlivening smiles.


Avery begins each work with pencil drawings that she leaves visible, while colouring in various details. We witness the piecing together of partial memories. Some more vivid than others. Some just outlines, some vaguely textured with hints of specificity. The bare architectural perspective rendering is unpainted in many places, showing structural layering. Layers build understanding. Avery shows how history’s narratives begin with the simplicity of a thought, a mark.

Avery discharges healing ammunition through the fiery force of expressive opposition to typically haunting war images. Injecting beaming countenances onto the scenes of Nazi invasion, parading explosive happiness in fitness exercise preparation (The Rosen Women working out, just before their advancement on the Nazis), and wielding weaponry to attack oppressors (The Rosen Women – Resistance 1) Avery displaces impassivity with proud determination, asserting joy in passionate resistance. Painting female heads on male physiques of an exercising assembly, Avery asserts an integration of the perceived physical strength of masculinity with female intelligence.

Leafy textures, shadowy garden-like patches that camouflage,
embeding the rifles of the resistance fighter busts (The Rosen 
Women in their camouflage) seems to ask questions Blake posed
in his 1793 poem, Visions of the Daughters of Albion:

Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made?

Tell me what is a joy? & in what gardens do joys grow?

And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains

Wave shadows of discontent?

Avery’s camouflaged gardens defend against the rivers of sorrow because her mountainous formations protrude gunning female power.


In War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945, the author Chang-tai Hung speaks about challenging society to personalize the death and destruction of war by considering the power of female symbology in street theatre. “If the patriotic resistance struggle could somehow be reduced to human terms, if it could be individualized as a person —a flesh-and-blood human being endowed with authentic feelings and experiences—then powerful nationalistic reactions among the people might be evoked… Their ability to understand and identify with the female symbols presented to them, to feel that "she is one of us," was therefore crucial to the success of the play and to the creation of a sense of common heritage and purpose.” ([3]) Avery’s heroines become characters portrayed by her immediate female family members symbolizing moral responsiveness (The Rosen Women – Resistance 2) and (The Rosen Women – Resistance 3). She includes her own portrait amongst these characterizations. Her paintings cultivate the spirit of solidarity with women we can relate to, creating the bridge between subject and viewer. Avery’s work identifies a connection that enables the viewer to aspire to countering oppression, utilizing the painted subject’s comic pathos. We can confront the horror because of Avery paints theatrical cheerfulness.


From the Harold Bloom collection, Literature in the Holocaust, Mark Cory’s essay, Comic Distance in Holocaust Literature (204): “Beyond marking moral boundaries and establishing nuances of credibility in incredible circumstances, the comic in Holocaust literature also functions as resistance, as protest.” ([4]) Establishing authenticity with the composition’s photographic documentation Avery’s comically happy resistance fighters become protestors. Her risible interpretation launches The Rosen Women with resonant integrity, producing an ethically comedic response to the staggering decimation the Holocaust created.


Avery’s subjects release intense curative powers, heightening the complicated and difficult memory of the slain and afflicted. We are shown an accessible way to think of the carnage. Avery challenges us with effusive enthusiasm, painting a vigorous force.


The Rosen Women by Hinda Avery
Martin Batchelor Gallery
712 Cormorant St
Victoria BC

May 28 - 23 June 2011

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[1] http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holo.html
[2] Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust 1988, pp. 242–244).
[3] Hung, Chang-tai. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft829008m5/
[4] http://www.scribd.com/doc/40067590/10/Comedic-Distance-in-Holocaust-Literature