The raven and the butterfly

There are people coming to the walls of the Visual Arts Studio Association and they are decorated with animals real and imagined as well as an assortment of symbolic butterflies and golden apples among other things.

You can thank the well-paired duo of Larissa Hauck and Marina Alekseeva. Femme Noir, the name of their joint effort opening on Tuesday, is a fascinating exploration of figures involved in some mythical and even mystical enterprises. One piece called L'Appel du Vide (meaning The Call of the Void) shows a woman's head bent forward, her long, thick hair bejeweled with butterflies, all covering her face.

Hauck, a painter still shaking the freshness off of her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Alberta College of Art and Design, explained that those butterflies mean something. They represent various concepts of afterlife and transformation or metamorphosis in many cultures and religions: “letting go of the past, moving on in your life, and letting go of people, moving into a ‘bloom' for lack of a better word,” she offered.

The works with all of their strange fauna are loosely based on real life, somehow.

“The series that I'm working on right now I've been exploring women and nature and the archetypes of femininity that appear in literature and art history like ‘women as night and man as day' or ‘women as the ephemeral'… those kinds of clichĂ©s that have gone over through the years,” she began, mentioning that a few pieces reference Venus, Psyche and other familiar figures used as mythical influences in art history.

“From that, I take very personal themes and I try to introvert them into a more contemporary way. I don't want them to be 100 per cent a reflection of me. I want them to be able to be interpreted by anyone, really, and their interpretation is just as valid as mine.”

This show marks a milestone moment in Hauck's art career. She's done a fair number of group exhibits and was one of the nearly 40 artists who had works in last year's Women Portraying Women, the largest show that VASA ever put on. With so many faces and names represented in that event, it might have been tough to get a real sense of who she is and what she's trying to do as an artist. With more than 20 of her works hung for Femme Noir, it should become quite apparent that she's interested in interpretive figurative work: paintings with people and their butterflies.

Her counterpart in this exhibit, Russian born tattoo artist Marina Alekseeva, is equally interested in interpretive figurative work. She prefers to categorize her work as surrealist.

“I'm trying to paint the object and the relationships between the objects in the painting, to encode some ideas into the objects in the painting. For the viewer, it would be like a puzzle to understand what every single thing in the painting means.”

For instance, there's one work called Lucky Catch that shows a sketch of a woman in a black dress with raven black hair, a raven even perched on her shoulder. The woman is holding a strange green creature that looks like a cross between a feathery bird and an iguana with webbed toes. The drawing is so dark that I even missed seeing the bird at first but it's that green lizard/bird that naturally has my attention, especially since it's the only bit of colour on the page. What is that thing? Why is the woman so happy?

What does it all mean?

“Sometimes in our lives we have these situations when something unexpected and a very happy event happens and you just need to catch them and hold them,” the artist explained. “Even on the dark side of your life, something very unusual and unexpected can happen. You need to pay attention to the details to see when it happens to you.”

Like Hauck, Alekseeva has contributed around 20 mostly oil paintings to Femme Noir, many of them are similarly inspired by mythology. In Judgment of Paris, she interprets a Greek myth into a contemporary setting where a woman plays a piano in front of an audience, a golden apple hanging overhead.

This is the first major exhibit for this artist in Canada.