Art Trip: All of Them Witches assembles artwork of 78 artists – most of them women – at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles – The Globe and Mail

More than 300 years after those hysterical trials in Salem, Mass., the figure of the witch ensorcels our culture still. Perhaps especially today, when complaints of a “witch hunt” have become rote politics. Who, then, dares to associate with witches?

At the sprawling Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles, curators Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons have organized an exhibition of artworks that employ images of the supernatural and witchcraft to “channel ideas about power, the body and gender.” The “witchy” sensibility, the curators say, “signals a turn away from the usual ‘rational’ power structures that have enforced sexual and gender hierarchies back to something ‘irrational’ (i.e. symbolic, magical, unspeakable) that suggest a way forward.” The exhibition All of Them Witches, on view through April 11, assembles the artwork of 78 artists – almost all of them women – including Canadians Suzy Lake and Sascha Braunig.

A large-scale photo print from Lake’s 1996 series Re-Reading Recovery shows the Toronto-based artist dressed in a slip brooming peels of paint and plaster from the floor. Lake says she wanted to create a “positive image” of an aging woman. “The figure is very determined as opposed to submissive like a Cinderella,” the artist says. She works quietly, but with resolve and strength, rebuilding outside and within.

Meanwhile, Braunig’s oil painting Halter pictures a thorny, vine-like character grappling with a dress. The artist from Qualicum Beach, B.C., wanted to evoke the image of the witch without reproducing the popular likeness of a hag with hooked nose and pointy chin as imagined by Renaissance artists such as Hans Baldung Grien and repeated unto today. That hollow, cartoonish image – which felt too dark to replicate here, she says – has dealt real violence, as such lore stoked fears, and men and women both were accused of practising witchcraft and killed. Instead, Braunig presents an interpretation of the witch likely closer to historical fact: We see this disobedient figure shown stretching the limits of a more recognizable form, the gown, with all its allusions to gender, normativity and how one is supposed to act in the world. The artist is interested in the entanglement between fact and fiction, she says, and how that age-old image of the witch continues to “haunt” us now.

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