NYAB Event - Tonya Ingersol "Through the Woods"

Tonya Ingersol "Through the Woods"

June Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

An exhibition of recent paintings by Tonya Ingersol — large, colorful tableaux inhabited by fantastical imagery that chronicles our contemporary times in the tradition of fairy tales — will open at the June Kelly Gallery on September 8.

Entitled Through the Woods, the works represent a departure from Ingersol’s earlier realistic and detailed but still mystical style. The artist notes that fairy tales have long been used as a source of inspiration in many artistic disciplines. Here, Ingersol deploys her visual imagery to portray the timeless and universal themes of life and to emphasize the importance of passing eternal and vital truths from generation to generation.

Ingersol’s paintings now have evolved into flat forms with bold primary color saturation and spatial incongruity, and carry the symbols of the psychological threats and the confusing and disturbing situations of life.

It has been recognized for many centuries, even before the days of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch who died in 1516, that fairy tales provide valuable insights into the dark side of life, the very idea of evil, duplicity and false pretenses, the social and political interactions of humanity, both good and bad. Learning of these dangers through such a relatively benign medium as a fairy tale helps people cope metaphorically with their fears – and to cope with life.

In an exhibition catalogue for an earlier show of Ingersol’s work, a critic wrote that the artist’s great story-telling gift “is her capacity to insert a discrepancy or ambiguous fact in her scene, a mysterious signifier, just because it needs to be there, although one can’t exactly rationalize it. Such devices, one suspects, allow for the real nature of things to be uncovered in wondrous ways.” In her new work, Ingersol demonstrates that she hasn’t lost that ability.

Ingersol lives and works in Baltimore. She received bachelor’s degrees in music composition from the Oberlin Conservatory and in mathematics from Oberlin College. She also received an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Hoffberger School of Painting, where she studied with the director, Grace Hartigan.

In addition, she studied the human figure in Florence, Italy, in the summer of 2001 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in the summer of 2002.

Among the collections in which Ingersol’s paintings are represented are the Baltimore Museum of Art; The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park; France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, Hippodrome Foundation, Inc., Baltimore; Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, and Sire Management, New York.