Created by Independent Curator Jess Van Nostrand, Girls Growing features artists whose work challenges clichéd vocabulary and old-fashioned ideas associated with girls growing up and women getting older, turning the tables on words such as “blossoming” and “blooming” and shining a new light on the reality of growing up as a girl.

Artists:
Judy Blotnick (Boston)
Margi Geerlinks (Rotterdam, NL)
Ginny Ivanicki (Vancouver, BC)
Anya Janssen (Arnhem, NL)
Claire Johnson (Seattle)
Kipling West (Calgary, BC)
Barbara Wijnveld (Amsterdam, NL)
Jenny Zwick (Seattle)

Girls Growing will mark the West Coast debut for Dutch painter Barbara Wijnveld, who was short-listed for the Prix de Rome in 2004 and was a winner of the Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2004. This will also be the first Seattle show for Judy Blotnick from the Skirt Gallery in Boston, and Dutch painter Anya Janssen, whose work was most recently seen at Art Basel 2005 with the Torch Gallery of Amsterdam.
Margi Geerlinks, also from The Netherlands, was featured in the Henry Art Gallery’s “Gene(sis)” exhibit in 2002.

Local artists featured are SOIL members Jenny Zwick (www.jenniferzwick.com) and Claire Johnson; also represented are illustrator and former Seattleite Kipling West, and painter Ginny Ivanicki from Vancouver (www.ivanicki.com).

Without relying on expectations of female coming-of-age imagery, the artists in Girls Growing present new ways of thinking about change. Their differing uses of two-dimensional media show a breadth of talent and sensitivity to the subject that addresses the theme while placing the quality of the work in the forefront.