Reviews

ART REVIEW

GIRLS GROWING
WHERE: Soil Gallery, 112 Third Ave. S.
WHEN: Through Aug. 31.Hours: Thursdays-Sundays, noon-5 p.m.

What's Happening
HEADLINES
Soil's marvelous 'Girls Growing' paints aging in an unusual light
These ethereal paintings will stick with you

By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC

"In an oil painting titled "Lucy and Linda Hellbent on McGregor Street," Ginny Ivanicki explores the density of blocked desire. The girls she paints are too large for their bike and toy tractor and seem to be pushing their vehicles into the ground in an effort to move forward.

Wherever they're going, they can't get there from here. In this small-town scene, the hot light flattens the color and bleaches the background of bleak street and buildings. The day cooks, the energy evaporates, and yet there's a stubborn determination to go on. These are girls who can't imagine anybody picking them as subjects of high romance, but they are nonetheless full of fierce feeling and grimy heat.

Vancouver, B.C.'s Ivanicki is part of a remarkable exhibit titled "Girls Growing" at Soil, organized by freelance Seattle curator Jess Van Nostrand and featuring eight artists who cast an unconventional light on the subject of growing up and growing old.

Again, Ivanicki: Her oil painting, "Rita P. When the Ford Was New" is a raw, impatient kind of Photo Realism, lacking the movement's glossy sheen and formal precision. The painting is a deadpan populist gesture, bluntly made but with subtle riffs. Just as a color snapshot decays in the family's photo album, this painting is leaking away as you look at it, with drips in the grass and the gorgeous car's grill........

..........In the '90s, women artists from Sue De Beer, Kristin Calabrese and Kim Dingle to Anna Gaskell and Malerie Marder began to assert a nervy new version of feminism. They were body conscious in a bold new way. The artists in "Girls Growing" assure us that this exploration continues. "

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