Dacia Gallery: Women’s Art on E. 11th

Feb 28

*Unit 2 Day 4* by Brooklyn-based figurative artist Emily Roth

Dacia Gallery’s annual Women Artist Exhibition opens Thursday, March 2, with work by a dozen emerging female artists. Taken as a whole, the show portrays the female condition as at once joyous, reflective, cautious, exhilarated, and mundane.

An opening reception is slated for 6 PM on Thursday, followed by an artist talk at 8 PM. The gallery says the show includes “an eclectic mix of contemporary artists” that offers a glimpse of “what is currently being created by women artists in representational art at the peak of a new movement.”

The show is one of two slated to open during the first few days of Women’s History Month at 621 E. 11th St. EV Gallery, right next door to Dacia, has a women’s group show opening on Friday, 6-9 PM.

One piece that stands out at Dacia is an oil-on-canvas self-portrait entitled Unit 2 Day 4 by Brooklyn-based figurative artist Emily Roth. @_emilyrothartwork The piece depicts a woman sitting at a desk, appearing none-too-excited about the entry she is making in a journal. There is light, and cool air, entering the room from a window with an air conditioner in it.

“The piece as a self portrait is reflective of the time spent during Covid lockdown thinking of how time felt more compartmentalized and slower moving, which for me allowed for time for things I hadn’t slowed down for enough in a long time to appreciate,” Roth told B Scene Zine.

The work seems not of this time and Roth acknowledged that she is inspired by Vermeer and other 17th Century portrait artists. A glance at her oeuvre bears this out. But Unit 2, Day 4 also brings to mind 19th Century portraiture, perhaps the work of Valentin Serov, or the early portraiture of Edouard Manet. In the piece, and in some of her other works, her use of light and darkness seems to clearly harken back to the Baroque period, minus the size, opulence, and religious iconography.

That the piece would focus on a mundane task like writing in a journal was hardly surprising. In an interview with Shoutout Atlanta Roth said her work “seeks to explore our relationship with time and how it affects our behavior, interactions, and passions, as well as the construction and adherence to routine.”

“My interest lies in exploring the everyday actions that we collectively spend most of our life performing yet assign little existential value or meaning or even find unpleasant. These actions or tasks are often required in order to be considered a functional member of society or to facilitate other tasks in of themselves, necessary but rarely the focus of high art,” she said.

Another standout of the show is called Self-Awareness, a 2018 Charcoal and pastel on paper by Victoria Steel, a Miami native contemporary realist fine artist and head instructor of ÀNI Art Academy America now based in Red Bank, NJ. @victoriasteelart

The piece depicts mirror images of two women staring expressionless into each other’s eyes. They are separated by the filigree of a lattice climbing a wall in the background. That pieces of the lattice appear to be caressing the figures’ necks suggest that the self-awareness depicted in the piece can be at once enlightening and dangerous.

Another piece of note: Latch, an acrylic on canvas by Francie Hill, currently a junior studio art major at NYU who describes herself as “a prolific doodler who dabbles in hyperrealism, portraiture, and bold color.” @franciehillart

Latch positions the viewer as within arm’s reach of a woman’s back, her bra secured by a metal door latch, the kind with a sliding bold you might find on the inside of a public restroom. The work suggests that the bra is secured, but not locked. If the breasts are a metaphor for the heart, this subject is at once closed and secure; open to possibilities, but not without effort.

The show also includes brilliant and engaging work by other women artists, including Nanci France-Vaz, Paige Bradley, Erin Anderson, Alexandrea Nicholas-Jennings, Sherri Wolfgang, Victoria Bradley, Janet Cook, Stephanie Deshpande, and Leah Lopez.

The show that opens Friday at EV Gallery includes work by Gulsum Keskinoglu @awomaninthearts, Sneha Sinha @snaybelle, Kiarra Elliot @afrocentrickeyy, Ta Ming Chen @tamingchenart, Rebecca Marley @rebeccaemarley, ABE @avantgardeabe, Parisa Pirooz @parisapirooz1, Angela Ambrosini @angelambro_pixs, and Mikako Shojima @mikakoatelier.