Linda Vredeveld’s work reveals how far we’ve come as a culture in Feminisms’s quest to be realized. A scrapbook-like assortment of images, fabrics, and colors call up an era when we thought we were almost there. Men’s shirt sleeves and bed dust ruffles transport us back to a time in which our sense of self was forming and choices were being made. Female icons Princess Di and Jackie O appear alongside images from familiar fairytales and pre-teen horse fantasies, and all this gets sorted through the multiple edits and compositional manipulations of abstract gestural painting.

Large paintings and paper works are collaged with ephemera from a few decades ago, but the kitschy, nostalgic allure leads to more somber connections. Vredeveld’s artistic persona is the postmenopausal woman who is looking back at her coming of age in the 1980s and asking, “What happened?” The work creates a context for a modern day “therapy session” that attempts to make sense of the micro and macro tragedies of living in a sexist world.