Women with a mission

OLGA LIVSHIN

The Lookout Gallery on the second floor of Regent College at the University of British Columbia is a small, airy mezzanine, cheerful and saturated with light. It seems singularly suited for Dr. Hinda Avery's new art exhibition, The Rosen Women Return to Regent: Bolder and in Better Fighting Form, which opened Sept. 17.

Avery is not a professional painter. She taught women's studies for many years, painting in her spare time. "I worked as an academic, but I feel much more at home painting." After retiring, she dedicated her life to art, with the main theme of her paintings persisting through the years: women. "I have always been a feminist," she said.

Concerned about social injustices towards women all over the world, Avery dived wholeheartedly into the second wave of feminism movement that hit North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "I got caught up in it," she admitted. She involved herself in the creation of women's centres in Vancouver and Victoria. "We all had such a feeling of euphoria. We were finally liberated! We could have a voice."

The Rosen women exhibition is another step on Avery's nonstop journey towards women's rights and equality. "I'd call my show a feminist show," she said. "I portray women in a way that mainstream culture doesn't portray us."

In Avery's paintings, women are not very young, nor very skinny. They wouldn't be considered beautiful in fashion-magazine or movie terms, but they, and their creator, don't care. Their vitality, courage, humor and desire for justice permeate the canvases. Their inner beauty shines through. They are definitely having the last laugh, although the explicit topic of the paintings is not funny – the show is about the Holocaust.

"My women are fighting against all social atrocities and genocides of our times. The Nazis are just a symbol, a metaphor of heinous," Avery explained. She first conceived the idea for this sequence of paintings after a trip to Europe to research her family's past. In 2003, she visited Holocaust memorials in Poland and Germany, searching for traces of her Jewish grandmother and aunt who perished during the Second World War. When she didn't find any, she decided to build a memorial herself. That's how the first painting was born.

There are two distinctive parts to Avery's memorial, reflecting two stages in the series' development. The first – represented by four Rosen women (Avery's mother, grandmother, aunt and herself) – was previously exhibited.

In the first exhibit, there were nine paintings. Each one showed a Rosen woman posing as a different Jewish female freedom fighter of the war. Every painting had a text attached, listing the names of the real heroines of Jewish resistance and quoting their words. Avery's memorial to her murdered relatives morphed into a commemorative display of 36 Jewish women who fought Nazism.

In this first exhibit, the Rosen women were victims in Auschwitz, weak, naked and scared. As Avery's made-up story progressed, the feelings of dread and oppression were replaced by the warrior spirit. Determined to fight back, the characters in the artist's visual narrative turned more aggressive. They donned uniforms and acquired weapons. Not helpless prisoners anymore, they were going into battle against evil.

Livelier, stronger and spunkier than before, the Rosen women of the current exhibit are plotting various blights against the Third Reich. They are not playing roles anymore. They are participating: planning to overthrow the governments, conspiring to assassinate Hitler, spying and sabotaging for the Jewish underground. Each painting still has a text attached, but the texts themselves become infused with drollery. If one laughs at a monster, the monster stops being scary.

"At first, I didn't have any fun. The topic was too depressing, so I didn't use color," Avery recalled. In her opinion, to express the real horrors of the Holocaust, an artist has to step into the abstract, to make the topic more conceptual and more personal at the same time, which required a lot of courage.

Avery found the courage in her art. She lightened the mood of her paintings and started using brighter colors. "The latest paintings of the Rosen women have become puns," she said. Furthermore, they now include the entire female part of her family, "the whole mishpochah."

"The images mock themselves and simultaneously shame the horrors of the Holocaust," said Duffy Lott Gibb, the co-ordinator of the show. "It's the only possible response to the craziness of war."

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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