Opens January 24, 2025 at Chefas Projects, Portland
“Starting in California’s Bay Area, up through Southern Oregon, into Washington State, and across the border into British Columbia, Witches of the West features the work of the five female artists living and working along North America’s West Coast.
From the intricate pyrography of Alexis Mixter, and the bold paintings of Jennifer Ament and Meghan Hildebrand, to the miniature worlds created by Shannon Taylor and my own embellished collages, all of the pieces in this show exude a powerful, defiant, feminine energy. Not only is the energy similar, our work is also connected by the use of elements from nature. Is this a byproduct of being from the west? Maybe. Or, perhaps it’s a little more mystical than that. Wood, water, flowers, fire, and soooo much gold — gold leaf, glitter, gold paint, gold lockets — you can’t get that much gold without a whipping up a bit of creative alchemy!
Each of us creates powerful work on our own, but when shown together, an entirely new spell is cast. Witches of the West conjures up positive energy, humor, beauty and magic at a moment in history when I believe we need it most.
–Danielle Krysa, Curator & Artist”
I’ve written something about each piece in the show, as follows. Meg
One Each
My original idea was to call this one “to each a spark” however I felt there was too obvious a connection to sparks to fire to the overall palette. The idea of 'one each' to me speaks about fairness, equality. A community where everyone is looked after equally, everyone has a home, an equal vote, a voice. I’ve been exploring lines, as a way to describe surfaces, to direct paths of energy, to combine colours. To me, the ghost like characters represent the life to death cycle, the presence of loved ones now gone, and are also an indication of my generation - I wiled away too many hours on PacMan at the little video arcade at the hot springs outside whitehorse. I only tolerated the hot springs for the fries and the PacMan. It’s a spa now, no PacMan, no fries. In the game, the ghosts could disappear off one side to appear on the opposite side, which is why I like to place them on the edges of the painting.
My mom was an artist and making art makes me feel close to her. Long ago she would bring home wonderful kid’s books illustrated with lush landscapes and animal habitats, or cozy homes or searching for a home. I still like to paint cozy places, with doors and windows that invite you inside. Another childhood passion was designing floor plans for my dream home, I love being home, we all deserve a cozy home.
Touch a Tree for Luck
Been listening to a podcast about present day witches. A guest spoke about having always been a witch and not knowing it until she grew up and learned what a witch was. She would seek out solace and create ceremonies in the woods. She would conjure little spells to attempt to control her world. I also loved roaming in the woods around our neighbourhood, a suburb in the wild, and have been prone to magical thinking. A titillating fear of sasquatch, touching wood for luck, feeling responsible for the outcomes of my thoughts, good or bad. I grew up in the United Church, the church will certainly prime you to believe in ghosts. What’s the difference between a spell and a prayer? I enjoyed the stacked vertical composition here, gives me a sense of up and down river and feels dramatically steep. I leaned into the direct compliments of pink and blue for vibrancy and a child-like energy. Here I see the ghosts in relation to the tree stumps. The loss of life/transfer of energy. The tragedy of killing forests.
Some trees appear to be large pinecones. I intentionally played with scale, to create places filled with magic and mystery. Scenes that makes less sense the longer you look.
Fjord Tough
My crack naming team, Zoe and Janet, helped come up with this title. If it’s not obvious, it’s a riff on the “Ford Tough” ads on TV, hyper masculine, drive over anything ads. My scene is based on a place called Refuge Cove, in Desolation Sound, a fjord just north of where I live. Fjords in Canada are "long, narrow inlets characterized by steep sides, created in a valley carved by glacial activity” (wikipedia) Refuge Cove is a water only access community with a small rugged year-round population. There are no trucks and it is serene and fantastic and my favourite place. There is a precarious boardwalk linking the general store to surrounding cabins, which is not open to the public. It is very special and really makes you want to walk on it and go inside those cabins.
There is an unusual figurative element to this painting, something I decided to experiment with. In the spirit of experimentation I used a gloss surface for the water. I usually choose a matte surface overall, but here I was hoping to super-black the black.
The Leroy Decoy
Another podcast I was listening to (‘Hysterical’ by Wondery) was about a town in New York called Le Roy where in 2011 high school girls suffered a mysterious illness featuring tics and convulsions. It went down as ‘conversion disorder’, or mass hysteria (drawing comparison to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692), although there were many indications that this could have been environmentally caused. For example, there were gas fracking rigs ON the school field were the girls affected played sports. Okay, so the painting is not about that story, but it got me on a train of thought about girls, how they can be seen as hysterical when they are simply trying to tell the truth. It got me thinking about value of preserving natural spaces for people to be well. The right not to be poisoned by industry. To go back to the podcast about Le Roy, there is apparently no consensus on whether it’s pronounced le ROY or LEE roy. It seems to be divided along class lines. “The Leroy Decoy” is a wordplay I came up with. Depending in how you say Le Roy it sounds better to say decoy with the opposite emphasis. The more you say it, the funnier it sounds. It’s a fun title.
Laying Low
A zoomed out version of the other places detailed in my other paintings. This loosely represents the area where I live, qathet, on the Sunshine Coast, on the mainland of BC, backed by the Coast Mountains and protected by Vancouver Island. When we started boating a few years back I found out what a complicated and magnificent coastline I live on. I’ve used the mountain shapes I observe every day to explore colour, shapes and scale, and textural lines. I like the effect of space filled in with magic marker - mountain shapes are one of the first things I remember drawing. An early exploration of stacking shapes in space, jagged peaks with peaks peeking out from behind them and more behind them and even more behind them. Then a huge yellow sun of course. There are a few symbols here that appear in other work. The ovoid shapes with the slash through the middle could be clams to represent ancient middens or food gathering sites. They also resemble UFOs to some. The stacks of dots represent mineral exploration, piles of something extracted, stacks of wood, or simply smaller hills. The clusters of coloured dots can represent points of interest, the location of specific items or communities, or more literally, buoys. Above all they allow me to add visual interest and bops of colour, and invite the viewer to invent.