Artist, poet Janelle Victoria combines artforms to speak on body positivity

In her poem “Pretty,” poet, artist and educator Janelle Victoria talks about how her father never called her pretty when she was growing up.

Instead, he called her smart while looking at all the As on her report card, and tough when she “was up to bat in Little League / and the pitcher hit (her) hard, maybe on purpose,” and she didn’t cry.

“What’s better / than being pretty?” Victoria writes. “Being loved beyond / your body.”

With her show “her,” which combines watercolor images of feminine bodies with poems, Victoria hopes to instill that idea in viewers, that they are more than their appearance and that their imperfect body is perfect just the way it is.

“Her” soft opened Jan. 2 and officially opens Friday and runs through Jan. 31 at D2 Gallery and Studio.

Victoria grew up writing and drawing in Colville, the daughter of a carpenter father and a business professor mother. Victoria believes that blue collar upbringing is the reason her poems are grittier and represent a small town mentality.

She recalls college classmates questioning a poem she wrote about helping her dad roof a house, saying it should have been about something she’s actually experienced.

“I’m like ‘I did. I went through three pairs of gloves roofing that place,’ ” she said. “Trying to capture Colville in a poetic way is one of my lifelong missions.”

While growing up in Colville, Victoria wrote and created art when she wasn’t outside playing and getting dirty. It was important to her, she remembers, but not her full identity.

Those outlets took up more of her time as she got older, to the point that she decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s degree in poetry. All the while, her father asked why she wasn’t pursuing something more practical, like becoming a fighter pilot.

Victoria remembers thinking “Well, I’d need perfect eyesight for that, which I don’t have.” But she shared some of her father’s concerns, wondering if this was a viable path for a “reasonable adult” to pursue.

“But the older I get, the more I realize I’m not a reasonable adult,” she said. “I can’t stop creating. I don’t want to stop creating. In adulthood, I realized this is part of who I am, and Colville will always also be a part and that gritty, blue collar, working class. They’re melded together in a way that I can’t separate.”

Being an unreasonable adult has led Victoria to publish six books of poetry under the name Janelle Cordero, including her most recent collection “Talk Louder,” which will be for sale at D2 while “her” is on view.

Two of Victoria’s poetry collections feature her artwork, but “her” marks the first time her work has appeared in a gallery setting.

The artworks, all titled “her,” were all created in 2025. Each piece features a watercolor portrait of a feminine body, some curvier, some slimmer, some by themselves and others with a partner. The use of watercolor adds a sense of fluidity to each piece, as if Victoria captured each body mid-motion, mid-dance.

The figures don’t have faces because Victoria didn’t want them to be too specific and wanted as many people as possible to be able to connect with the figures.

Victoria and D2 owner Michael Dinning began discussing an exhibition in spring 2025. Dinning said he looks for artists who have a specific thing to say through their work. Over the summer, he saw Victoria give a poetry reading and thought it would be interesting to bring both artforms together in one show.

It was only after Dinning suggested Victoria combine her art and writing into one show that the idea to use the exhibition as an exploration of girlhood into womanhood began to take shape. While reviewing her poems, some new, others previously published, Victoria began noticing themes that helped pull the show together, and she was reminded of the quote attributed to Madeleine L’Engle “I am still every age that I have been.”

“The show captures that in the sense that I’m still processing childhood as a woman in my 30s,” she said. “I’m still processing that arc of growing up and nostalgia and life-defining moments within girlhood and childhood that really shaped me.”

Dinning wanted to focus on the lightness of each piece, so he decided to suspend the poems in front of the artwork. He found the right poem for each piece by looking at how the shape of the printed poem compared to the shape of the figure in each painting.

“They interplay with the back piece, but they’re also standalone,” Dinning said about the poems.

Thinking back to “Pretty,” the first poem visitors see as they enter the gallery, Victoria believes most, if not all, women have experienced a shift, typically around junior high or high school, from “My physical appearance does not define me and is not the most important thing” to becoming more aware of their body and how the world sees them.

Those feelings are likely amplified now with the prevalence of filtered bodies sold as the ideal on social media and elsewhere on the internet.

With her work, Victoria wants to capture feminine bodies that are imperfect and therefore human.

“Everybody isn’t perfect, because we are organic beings, and we’re not these 2D creations that Instagram wants us to believe we are,” she said. “I’m hoping to capture that. It’s not only about the mental and emotional arc of girlhood, but it’s also about physically becoming this woman and then recognizing that the best thing that we can do for ourselves is to accept and love these bodies that we’ve been given, even though we’re constantly told to compare them and change them and alter them and filter them.”