Cultures collided and centuries collapsed last night at The Ladder Gallery where sisters Mardia and Ashley Powell opened their

exhibition "Two Womanish."
True to its name, which is a wink and a nudge to the Bahamian colloquialism "too womanish", the show is a flurry of feminine

color, material, subjects, practices and desires. Mardia's textile pieces and Ashley's paintings and poetry hold a powerful

conversation together that would have been less effective had they exhibited apart, each half providing pieces that patch

together the ironic, humorous, limiting and defiant landscape of the feminine in popular and local cultures.
But the pair wouldn't have wanted it any other way, sharing a close bond that has seen them attend The Art Institute of Atlanta

in the U.S. for Graphic Design together, both slated to graduate sometime toward the end of 2012.
The body of work on display into the middle of July at The Ladder Gallery in the New Providence Community Center is a collection

the sisters had been working on from the time they arrived home for summer in April. They took different approaches to the

theme they had chosen yet both paid homage to childhood girly memories.
By piecing together fabric swatches into portraits and animals, Mardia tapped into the practice of sewing and quilting, a

tradition of feminine bonding. During quilting sessions, women would come together to preserve and share family and community

histories through oral storytelling as well as the stories they told through their creations. The practice took a while to

come to her, but after inspiration hit -- thanks in part to stumbling upon a fabric-centric piece by Caribbean artist Brianna

McCarthy -- Mardia's creations took off.
"I'm more like the homemaker. So I wanted to incorporate that into the work," she said. "I really loved it. That's what

I was feeling. I wasn't feeling I wanted to paint or draw because I wasn't really inspired to do that; I just wanted to sit

down and relax and sew. I hadn't really done that in a long time."
Yet her pieces are, in a way, a tribute to their mother, who taught them how to sew and laid the foundation for their artistic

expressions.
"We learned how to sew because our mom used to teach us how to sew when we were small," said Ashley. "She wouldn't let us

use the sewing machine so we learned how to really sew and I thought that was so good to be able to recount this. Our mother

doesn't make this kind of art but we believe she has the ability.

But she taught us how to sew and now look at us. This

is really nice that Mardia could think of using this in this way, in terms of artwork, not making it just some type of vocation,

this can be put on display."
But any act of tradition is turned on its head in this space. In Mardia's pieces, hermit crabs, rooters and peacocks are

patched together seemingly haphazardly -- with loud fabrics next to louder fabrics, visibly uneven stitching straight onto

the canvas, and abstract swatch shapes, each pieces become a controlled chaos of beauty. The subversive act of such application

of fabric swatches underlie the defiant spirit of the body of work. The portrait piece "Mahogany" embodies this spirit, as

she applies swatches of neon pinks and blues to create a face with an unapologetic stare.
But tongue-in-cheek is not lost here -- the portrait of a little girl is titled "You Tink You is Woman, Ay?" and her piece

of a peacock with a breathtaking patchwork of a tail is called "Nah Das a Real Man", as Mardia taps into the very contradictory

and humorous power dynamic inherent in the Bahamian gendered landscape of language and performance, placing Bahamian language

and mating rituals into the context of those in the animal kingdom.
As Mardia's choice of materials allude to a sense of preserving story through the practice of quilting, Ashley's pieces strive

to create a story where it traditionally never had a place. She retains childhood memories of watching Jane Austin's plots

unfold on TV screens in such films as "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," adoring the courtship traditions

and dynamics, and yet being keenly aware of the lack of black representation in such fairytale scenarios.
"I wanted to see it mixed with funky Africannness somehow," Ashley explained. "The whole concept behind my series is I wanted

to put myself in history, in my own history. I was thinking look at me. I'm not Elinor, with my hair in a pompadour. This

isn't me. But I just want it to be likeness in my history, my history in my likeness, there."
Her paintings insert this representation into her memories, flurries of brushstrokes creating such pieces as "Royal Black,"

where a young black woman is the subject of a traditional Victorian portrait, complete with a starched ruff collar. Such

signifiers of this white-dominated era cross wires with her modern interpretation and relate to her sisters work, as she paints

patchwork into the borders of such pieces and uses fearless applications of color to fly in the face of history's boundaries.
In another piece, "Possibilities", a royal crown pulls a young black girl's hair back. Not the traditional royal portrait,

she looks off to the side in a gaze of longing, painted patches framing her lingering hope that all little girls have instilled

in them from popular culture and Disney films: to be a princess.

This is perhaps Ashley's most poignant piece, offering a

portrait of both despair and defiance, yet stands as a testament to a girlhood desire that is vastly unrealized as girls grow

up across the board.
"At that time William and Kate were getting married, and I thought, could I never be a princess?" she said. "Just thinking

about these things, I thought, let me just put myself in it, let me just make it what I want it to look like. I'm really

going to use my artistic license. I'm going to break the rules with this license to just composite this together. Put the

crown on my head."
In other pieces, she inserts her story into the landscape of girlhood dreams by directly painting her own words onto the canvas

-- she's also a spoken word poet. In "Poinciana-Like", a stark black and white line drawing of a girl with a flower in her

hair stares out at the viewer, flashes of color drawn across her cheeks, and the words that begin "I am like the Poinciana

petals when summer has ended" scribbled alongside. Such words become the manifestation of the inner turmoil next to the tranquil

outside façade, and her patched frames are absent -- instead, language itself has become the patches with which to tell the

story, the material with which Ashley marches into an unwelcome world, fiercely making her own history.
Overall, the exhibition is all about this enduring spirit. Though girlish in its materials and uninhibited applications of

color, the cutenesss masks an underlying edginess, rawness, and darkness. Luckily, humor is not lost here, neither is joy,

as the pieces embody the very complex spirit of the feminine in all of its manifestations and archetypes--the spirit that can

only be described as "womanish."

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