Watertown Artist's Work Showing in Brookline Gallery

The following announcement was released by Gallery 1581:

Gallery 1581 of Brookline presents In Her Image: Mary Re-membered, by Watertown artist Valerie Spain through Nov. 19.

Consisting of 23 paintings, watercolors, and mixed-media assemblages, the exhibit samples a larger, ongoing body of work, The Marian Cycle. Through it, Spain reinterprets the Madonna from a perspective informed by feminism, images of women from Celtic myth, the literature of goddess worship, and no trace of approval from the Vatican.

Raised in a strictly traditional Catholic family, as a teen Spain felt an unsettling disconnect between the received, doctrinal concept of Mary and the promptings and doubts of her own developing inner life. Though she loved images of the Madonna in art, the idealize Virgin Mother – “passive, sexless, impossibly perfect” – provided her scant spiritual comfort, much less a model for doomed emulation.

Flash forward some three decades: The spiritual transformation arising in adolescence now emerges as a return to, and reconsideration of, Mary, not the pedestal-occupying figure of Sunday School lessons and priestly sermons, but as a nexus of the sacred and the sensual, a portal into a mature artist‟s full-blown visual iconography of empowered womanhood.

From that robust wellspring of inspirational material, Spain combines traditional images of Mary, calligraphic excerpts from sacred texts, and liberally deployed anatomical references to flesh out a personal artistic vision and a reconstructed religious consciousness. Via those diverse elements, or members, the artist takes the discarded Mary of her youth and re-members her now.

“No single religion holds a monopoly on quirky, or antiquated, or what we might view as unenlightened representations of women," said Gallery 1581 Director Peter Alpers. "Valerie's artworks may have germinated in soil that's Catholic with a capital C, but they burst forth into the air we all breathe. In that sense, her sensibility is truly 'catholic, small c,' in the word's broader meaning of 'universal.'

"In these paintings and assemblages, through a scrim of religious fabric, we – whether we‟re believers, doubters, secularists, or outright apostates – glimpse the authentic workings of the engaged human heart.”

Gallery 1581, 1581 Beacon St. in Brookline, will host an artist‟s reception, free and open to the public, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday Oct. 21.