Artist Hinda Avery’s latest series,The Resisterrrz, features family and friends reimagined as cartoonish, foul-mouthed resistance fighters. makes paintings that reimagine the women in her family as Hitler-fighting feminist resisters.Hinda Avery
Hinda Avery rewrites history with her paintbrush.
Her large-scale feminist Nazi-busting paintings have emerged from her own ancestry. When Avery, a Vancouverite, travelled to Europe about a decade ago to determine how, when and where her mother's family – Polish Jews – died in the Holocaust, she couldn't find anything.
Upon returning, she began making art using images of her murdered grandmother and aunt – and casting herself and her mother with them in sombre concentration camp scenes. "Eventually I got tired of us being victims … and decided to paint us being very confident, feisty, brave and having a good time rounding up Hitler and his henchmen," she says.
Her latest series, The Resisterrrz, features the group (minus her grandmother and aunt – whose sad faces and stories no longer fit, she felt) as cartoonish, foul-mouthed burlesque dancers and resistance fighters. "The Rosen Women have transitioned into a group of optimistic, gun-slinging folks having the time of their life during a genocide," she writes in her artist statement.
Some people have balked – and Avery, 75, understands this is a sensitive topic. "I use humour as a weapon because what else do I have?" Three of the paintings are at The Cultch in Vancouver until July 25.
Marsha Lederman