Opening Friday, April 5, the Women’s Contemporary Art Exhibition features events throughout April

By Art Van Kraft for Ashland.news

The Woman Kind: Woman’s Contemporary Art Exhibition opening Friday, April 5, at the Langford Art Gallery in Phoenix showcases 12 local artists, including several Ashland residents. The women’s artwork covers a variety of mediums and styles, including wood, clay, cloth, paint, photography and music.

The exhibition will run for one month and will host a series of panels and events on women in the art world. The opening party for the gallery exhibition starts at 4 p.m. Friday, April 5, at the Langford Art Gallery, 4850 S. Pacific Highway, Phoenix.

The project was the concept of artist Beca Blake who collaborated with Langford Gallery owner Jack Langford to create what they say is a unique venue not seen in the Rogue Valley before.

“We want to emphasize how important it is to celebrate and support women in the arts,” Blake said. “It’s important because there is still a bit of a gender gap between how women are supported in the arts, not just women artists being shown in galleries and museums, but woman leading the business end of the industry. I think this is the first time we’ve seen anything like this in our area.”

The exhibition is adding a musical component with DJ Lex Stassi and bringing together three local nonprofits to share their work with a panel of artists speaking about women in the arts on April 21.

“Without other women to carry this story on to the next generation — It’s important for me that this exhibition include a range of generations and creativity, and I’m really happy we have DJ Lex Stassi. She’s representing a younger generation,” Blake added.

In her own artistic endeavors, Blake said she celebrates the resilience of women, drawing from her personal experiences as a mother navigating societal and domestic hardships. The artworks she created in Milk Visions reflects a journey of overcoming obstacles and finding joy amidst adversity.

“The intention of Milk Visions is to employ maternal generative processes, including birth-giving subjectivities, along with symbolic representations, illusory visuals, and performative engagement as the basis for new conceptions of visual art.

“I am exploring and documenting the limits to human freedom imposed by persecution, racism, sexism, politics, cultural bias, and war; favoring the powers of human creativity, life and love, over forces of destruction and death,” Blake said.

Victoria Christian is and artist who represents mythology and feminine mysticism in art. She graduated from Southern Oregon University, majoring in Sociology and Women’s Studies. She did thesis research on Women Artists and Identity Formation in a Postmodern Society, which turned out to be a major critique of culture and the art world. “The Slaying of the Dragon,” Christian said, “captures ancient Greek mythology. The sea dragon is slain by Gaia, a goddess and the personification of the earth. It’s an ecofeminist perspective on what is a modern-day presentation of this ancient myth. I published a book called ‘Feminine Mysticism in Art,’ so these paintings are the socio-political commentaries that are in my book.”

Alexis Mixter works in wood — wood-burning, to be exact. She says the process takes a lot of time, about 80 hours of wood burning to produce one piece.

“The biggest thing for me is when people get close to the artwork and spend some time, as opposed to how fast we consume things now days,” Mixter said. “My whole point is to let people slow down and take a look at this. This work is about the time taken to make a single line. The inability to rush through the process. It is about the smell of the wood as it burns and the texture of the lines as they form. It is about trying to control that which is so very difficult to control through patience and feeling what is happening under my fingertips. It is a meditation on line and flow.

“Using an ancient technique typically associated with ‘masculine’ hand-crafts and easily recognizable imagery, and repurposing it through abstraction and the influences of ‘traditionally feminine’ things such as braided hair and weaving, I am creating something entirely new. … No matter what you see or feel when interacting with my work, I hope to present a meditative moment where there is always something new to see.”

Kat Mciver is a ceramics artist and Expressive Arts Therapist with a long history of education and teaching. She said her ceramic sculpture “Bird Whisperer” comes from within.

“I experience my art as a radical response and prayer to life,” Mciver said. “Each piece develops as a deep, evolutionary process.”

Mciver moved to Ashland in 2007 to pursue art more fully and to continue offering classes and private sessions in “Clay as a Spiritual Practice.” Her extensive resume includes a Masters of Spirituality from the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California.

Inger Nova Jorgensen is a painter and sculptor who has cast a number of her bronze sculptures at the Langford Gallery. She said this piece would regularly be cast in bronze but it now a resin material. Jorgensen said the model is an Oregon Shakespeare Festival actor named Jonathan Luke Stevens.

“In a world increasingly dominated by digital simulations and artificial works of art, my work serves as a reminder of the irreplaceable value of human creativity and the profound experience of engaging with art that speaks to the soul,” Jorgensen said. “It’s an invitation to rediscover the transformative power of art as a conduit for reconnecting with our innate humanity and forging a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the natural world that sustains us.”

Jorgensen says she plans to have 12 similar works added to this to make a series with each one covered by different type of foliage.

“This sculpture is a metaphor of the meadow overtaking me. It speaks to our connection with nature with the foliage overtaking the figure. It portrays where we are in this jump of point in the whole world in every area, also concerning AI,” she added.

Allyson Barnes is an artist who has photographs exhibited in Los Angeles and published in the New York Times. Her work is thematic and personal, often using herself as the subject. Being an artist is ultimate freedom to create, not care what others think to get in the zone and know that everything is going to be alright.

“I’m an Ashland-based artists who loves photographing people,” she said. “I discovered conceptual photography and consider it to be the ultimate challenge in expressing fun and creative ideas.”

Combining artist visions and the outdoors is her dream job.

The gallery will host Community Works, a local non-profit that focuses on domestic violence that will host a Heart Warming Party, on April 14; the American Association of University Women on April 21; the Progressive Oregon Women give a talk on April 28.

Art Van Kraft is an artist living in Ashland and a former broadcast journalist and news director of a Los Angeles-area National Public Radio affiliate. Email him at artukraft@msn.com.