Deborah Maris Lader Featuring: Against all Odds

           Deborah Maris Lader’s print work features women with strange twisting limbs, perched on tree branches, little girls with holes in them, and a variation of images featuring birds or birdlike creatures.  I selected this for review not just for locality and ease of access for me personally, but because I enjoyed the dreamlike images she portrayed in her exhibit.

The Girl Gets Away, by Deborah Maris Lader

            The artist seems to convey scenes that have played out from some deep unconscious place, and I can glimpse metaphors in her work.  Ideas like change, growth, and events in time.  The bizarre landscapes and characters describe the makings of dreams, and of a place separate from mundane reality, where our ideas flourish but don’t follow the rules of society.  They are warped representations of humanity, of our ideas, our dreams, and our pitfalls. 

            In the etching Against all Odds, one can see a great bird flying forward, to no one knows where, but the tittle suggests a journey, against all odds, that must be completed.  This is similar to The Girl Gets Away, which shows a girl with wild strands of hair leaping up and away from the predatory from of a stalking shark.  Both of these works show a willingness to triumph, to climb new heights. 

Suspended, by Deborah Maris Lader

            This gallery speaks volumes about life, growth, and the celebration of achievement, or even survival.  In Lader’s Suspended, there sits a girl on a floating staircase, a swing popping in from the sky on her right, and a bird soaring up with a slingshot pulled back at the ready.  This feels like a moment in time.  Although the bird could be seen as a potential victim of the slingshot, which seems large and threatening in its size, the scene feels like a remembrance, a memory of past playing in a schoolyard, and the little girl frozen in time, when in reality she will eventually become an adult and leave these games, and the whimsical joys of a child, behind.  Like the bird she was free to spry up on her toes, and lift her wings, but she has to keep flying, and will grow up and enjoy new experiences throughout her time on Earth.

            Lader’s artwork is of a high quality, and it’s obvious that she has placed a lot of effort into her creations, with highly detailed etchings, and many in large frames.  She seems to be conveying the idea of dreams, and of change, and she has done beautifully. It’s easy to see the surrealistic, dreamlike qualities in her work, and the ideas of change.  There is an almost evolutionary quality to her work, such as with At the Edge of His Story, which shows a boy falling forward only to change into a bird.  Uprooted, shows a story of a bird like creature holding a child in a gnarling of roots, another bird creature standing in the top corner, releasing birds from a box.  A path retreats off into the top right corner, suggesting a journey, the future, and of growth. 

            Lader’s work is a beautiful example of the subconscious, and of waking life itself, and of the changes that ensnare us all, with only our own motivations, and will, to break us free from life’s pitfalls.