NYC Women:  Willing The Distance Featuring Susan Austad, Heide Hatry, Cynthia Karalla, Katia Santibanez and Robin Tewes  April 13 – June 8, 2019   Opening Reception  - 2-5 PM, Saturday, April 13, 2019

The works of five female artists, Susan Austad, Heide Hatry, Cynthia Karalla, Katia Santibanez and Robin Tewes, who live and work in New York City will make up the next exhibition at Headbones Gallery from April 12 to June 08. In The Drawer’s Gallery, Julie Oakes, whose engagement with museums began at the MET in New York will show her latest gouaches from her series, One Cracked, Two Broken, based on drawings sourced there in December, 2018 - willing the distance smaller between New York City and Vernon, BC. Each woman has a committed studio practice in New York sustained while juggling family, teaching and maintaining active and extensive exhibition schedules both in New York and internationally. Each has ‘gone the distance’.  It is important to state the context, NYC, for it means they are working in the most sophisticated, and as yet unrivalled, art scene in the world and equally important to acknowledge gender as they contribute towards an ongoing evolution as women artists strive towards a more equitable positioning in the arts. The exhibition is amended (with Julie Oakes) who lived and worked in New York and still has a personal, artistic and political affiliation with these women. Susan Austad’s studio is in the heart of Soho where she produces large-scale, multi-media, kinetic wall reliefs based on imagery from the cosmos.  Using photographs of nebula, flocullant galaxies and Megallanic Clouds as her source material Austad creates pictures in watercolor on arches paper. She furthers her process by translating the visuals into relief:  mesh, three dimensional structures covered in layers of paper, tinted and then enhanced in palette with kinetic lights. Heide Hatry is known for her performances, often translated into videos. The immediacy of performance is not lost in translation because the content is so poignant. She has used unusual mediums (pig skins, chickens, eggs, blood) to construct physical spaces, figurative sculptures and as performance props. Headbones Gallery will present her latest video, Politics. Hatry brings a feisty female perspective into poignant and pertinent focus. She is represented by UBU Gallery in New York. Cynthia Karalla is a photographer who uses not only a sharply honed technique to capture subject matter but often pushes the medium to another level as she manipulates the photographic itself.  Headbones will be presenting works from the series The Girls aka Cracked Ribs and Bleached where memory and spirit are revealed through ghostly shades and the wear of ages suggested through patina. I Ching explores repetitive constructs affected by chance, as in the Asian game of fortunes. Her latest series, The Developer Sketches move into a chemical origination of the imagery so that much like an abstract painting the gesture of the photographer comes into play. Katia Santibanez works with hair-sized brushes to make sensuous compositions, often within a geometric composition.  Her extreme attention to detail could be compared to miniatures of old but rather than depicting a tiny scene or portrait, her delicate strokes are testament to the care and facility of a human touch, personal and intriguing. The shapes are not gestural however but more like a pattern where each element is given equal due and is absolutely necessary to the whole. She is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York. Robin Tewes, like many great feminists, concentrates on imagery often sourced from the home. She uses the architectonics of place to set the scene and then moves through narrative variance to reposition the point of view. These new works depict a country home where we are separated from the life inside but are able to realize by the changes that are seen from the exterior that there is more than one story, in fact the plot continually develops.  Using a perspective with a human edge, Tewes grants to the ordinary and extraordinary an aura that lifts what could be deemed ‘mundane’ up to a phenomenal stature.