Girl of Perpetual Springtime 2015

Curator: Jana Brike's "Girl of Perpetual Springtime," painted in 2015 with oil on canvas, offers us an enigmatic portrait set against a rather austere landscape. Editor: It gives me this odd sense of fragile stillness. That cool palette really amplifies it, and juxtaposed with what appears to be gold brocade is really speaking to an intersection of scarcity and resourcefulness. Curator: Right. There’s a fairytale quality to it, a young girl perched on what appears to be an old tree stump in a mountain range, complete with birds and butterflies, and the suggestion of a wound or birthmark on her cheek… Editor: Notice that contrast? The tree stump she’s perched on; what kind of manual labor or machines cut that? It’s raw. This girl, perhaps, she's dressed impeccably and adorned, yet the setting suggests a lack of industrial or agrarian process, it is not as tended or carefully extracted, yet there they are! Curator: She could be a forest spirit, some sort of elemental guardian or, perhaps, the personification of resilience; her careful ornamentation contrasting beautifully with a hardscrabble and icy environment Editor: True, it’s so captivating, I find myself pondering how the textiles involved are so materially divorced from this environment. Was it painstakingly stitched by a young woman using gaslight or electric light or passed down through generations? Curator: Or perhaps gifted. It’s that tension between refinement and something more untamed that intrigues. Her steady gaze, as the subject, meets ours unflinchingly. Editor: It makes you consider its purpose; I think we might take things like material production or material usage in art for granted if we didn’t ponder those kinds of questions. It gives this tableau some historical and cultural density beyond the superficial beauty. Curator: Jana Brike’s portrait truly offers a powerful look at the interplay of innocence, hardship, and ethereal beauty in the face of something formidable. Editor: Exactly, by questioning that tension between making and presentation, we open it to the realities of human experience and a material world!