Art In Bloom - Sojourn

Simple, real, fresh yellow flowers at the foot of Andrea Kowch’s Sojourn exhibitied at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Sojourn (2011) features two young women in a late summer landscape, seemingly unphased by a pending storm. Even as the wind whips around them, they are completely engrossed in the task of…catching butterflies.

Kowch’s work is magical realism, - fantastical elements in an otherwise mundane storyline. Their determined expressions and deliberate movement implies that it is of some importance. Is it a sentimental metaphor for the transition from adolescence to adulthood? The animated garments and windswept frizzled hair hair suggest psychological intensity, and act as a foil to the frozen gestures and placid expressions. The dilapidated settings and dated clothing situates the images in a place and a era that is uncertain.

Kowch’s work is acrylic with an overglaze that imparts a sheen like the surface of oil paintings.