Four women look deep inside for Chase Gallery’s ‘Portraits from Within’

This month, the Chase Gallery is featuring four artists with four perspectives, all in one show.

“Portraits from Within; 4 Emerging Spokane Artists” will exhibit work from four female artists: Carly Ellis, Elsa Oxford, Emily Flynn-Delay and Lily Henderson. Each of these local women will showcase multiple pieces of art displaying their perspective of what it means to be a modern woman.

Lily Henderson, 22, is a recent Eastern Washington University graduate who hopes to work in stop-motion movies and create sets, puppets and props. During this transitional period of life, her art series titled “So What’s Next?” explores the nuances and dread of moving onto a new chapter, finding a career and answering difficult questions.

She uses simple materials to create a sense of nostalgia and childlike wonder in each piece of art.

“I made a girl with her head in a dollhouse because most everyone can relate to the draw of escapism, especially the wish to escape into nostalgia and back to the feeling of childhood wonder and freedom,” Henderson said.

Beyond the external pressure from family and friends about moving to the next phase in her life, Henderson took the time for introspection and how it feels to be a woman at this period in time. One piece she highlighted is called “Dolly Baby,” exploring the shame of weight gain. She called upon the trends of social media platforms pressuring young women to try on their childhood clothes to see if they still fit.

“It has also been therapeutic to make works about the dread I have felt post graduation, the pressures to start living essentially a brand new life and leave childhood behind,” Henderson said.

Where Henderson is looking back to see a new way forward, Carly Ellis is weaving these perspectives together in her approach to photography.

Ellis, 27, a Maryland native and another recent EWU graduate, is using her familial roots to create mind-bending photography. Ellis’ mother was a basket-weaver and her uncle a photographer, both influences shining through in her woven photos.

Once she has two or more photos printed, she cuts them into strips or sections to create a new image. One piece titled “Unfamiliar” is about past and present identities as two opposing portraits are woven together. This duality of women is seen throughout her artwork and is a “commentary on that duality that women face,” Ellis said.

“Society demands purity and innocence while simultaneously stripping them of it,” she said.

This changing of perspective is a nod to all women – those who have shared and unshared experiences in their lives. Ellis wants her audience to instantly feel connected to her work, no matter how they interpret it.

“While my work reflects my personal hardships as a woman, I recognize that these experiences are not unique – they’re shared by many,” Ellis said.

Artist Emily Flynn-Delay, meanwhile, cultivates raw emotions in her “Names” series.

Flynn-Delay, 31, graduated from the University of Montana and lives with her husband and three dogs in Rosalia. Her work is a mixture of life-size sculptures and paintings.

She uses plaster body cast molds from models, and fills them with a hydrocal cement shell, and a metal armature filled with foam. The sculptures weigh about the same as an average person. One of her sculptures uses two bodies facing each other with a projector in the head cavity to project images onto each other.

“The purpose of my work is to connect with people and start a dialogue. I try to capture a specific feeling or concept well enough that someone who has experienced that can recognize it,” Flynn-Delay said.

Her Chase Gallery show will debut her “Name” series, a project she’s been working on for more than a year. The idea is to collaborate with a model and decide on an emotion or phrase, then work backward to decide how to portray it in a painting.

“We talked a lot about extreme emotions and inner thoughts during the concept phase of the project, so the best way I found to portray that visually was with intense, almost painful, color,” Flynn-Delay said. There are more than 15 concepts so far, and the show will preview the first three from the series.

The fourth and final artist is Elsa Oxford, a painter who will be showing self-portraits and those of her loved ones.

Oxford’s art will explore the “chaos, belonging and stillness seen in family dynamics.”

All of this hard work from the artists wouldn’t have been possible without the show’s curator, Kelly Baker. She said she wanted the show to focus on emerging female artists who can tell stories about themselves and others through a portrait lens.

While the art in this show is coming in many mediums, they all have a central message, about who we are internally, juxtaposed with what is projected externally.

“I think it took me a few years to realize that ‘artist’ is a label you decide for yourself. It isn’t contingent on medium or success; you just decide to be one.” Flynn-Delay said.

The exhibition runs until June 27 at the Chase Gallery in downtown Spokane.