Coming of Age Mary Kainer, Judith A. Mason, Ramune Luminaire

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​From left: Virtues & Vicissitudes detail, 2.5x4.75m, mixed media on board, 2017, Ramune Luminaire; Separation, 70x100cm, oil on board, 2017, Judith A. Mason;  Dementia detail, 91x213cm, mixed media on paper, 2017, Mary Kainer.

Exhibition: September 3 - October 1, 2017
Performance: September 3 @ 2 pm
Closing Reception and Talk: October 1 @ 2-4 pm

Coming of Age, as exhibition, reflects the deeply ambivalent social and personal perceptions of aging. Are the senior years a time of completion, reflection and serenity, or of impoverishment, loss and sorrow? Whether glorified or disparaged, aging is buried under a heap of preconceived ideas. Three accomplished female multi-media artists, Mary Kainer, Ramune Luminaire, and Judith A. Mason, each hovering around her 60th year, excavate this messy terrain. They consider age not only as a biological fact, but a cultural – and gendered - one. 
 
Kainer’s banner-like quirky mixed-media drawings combine data, collage, biomorphic forms and text. They address a range of health issues for the elderly:  dementia, diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis and vision loss. In them, she confronts the related over-prescription for geriatric, oft ill-defined illnesses and draws attention to individual experiences of deprivation that challenge the formation of existing societal myths around aging. Her accompanying figurative sculptures twist and reach, achingly passionate in their struggle.
 
A larger than life-sized female form by Luminaire pirouettes and arches her naked body with abandonment as she defies the disparaging descriptive words on the pedestal beneath used, at times, to describe the aging woman. Across the gallery, her floor-to-ceiling full-wall wooden game board – replicating “Snakes and Ladders” – plays out in surreal drawings an enticing, chaotic game for the over-60s: fall in love, long hospital stay, travel to see Taj Mahal, Alzheimer’s!
 
Mason’s evocative, vibrantly rich abstract paintings and mythological drawings combine in exhibition to tell of the not-easily-articulated interior life of the older woman. These two-dimensional works and the accompanying group of felted marionette-like figures restage her original ground – the psychic, physical and material space/places from which her feelings, sensations and sense of self emerged. Her evolving experiences of her familial intimate relationships as content are then exposed as she circumnavigates the terrain through these works (including an opening performance) showing collapse, emptiness, starkness, storms, pleasure, pressure and release.
 
The three, as generative makers, combine efforts in an attic installation where the detritus of their creative lives is reformed into seductive heaps of objects and materials exposed or partially hidden as memory boxes or illusive reminiscences. A contemporary triad of witches, they hover over a cauldron: oh, let the moment come when I may give myself over entirely to… to what? To art? To life?
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