Marilyn Frasca’s drawings, on view through Nov. 16 at Childhood’s End Gallery in downtown Olympia, exist at the intersection of dreams and stark reality, of hope and despair. An angelic figure strokes a pelican. A woman carries a goat; another sits astride a fox. People who’d fled bombing in Gaza were allowed to return home and found nothing left of their homes.
Frasca begins her works with abstract monoprints, then allows images to emerge, responding in charcoal and pastel to what she discovers on the paper. “Textures and shapes … seem to clarify and assemble themselves into astonishing pictures of people, places and events that have no recognizable connection to my life,” she wrote in an artist’s statement. “These figures (exist) in an ether of memory.”
Frasca’s images seem to have arisen from a collective unconscious. They often evoke archetypes or scenes from folk tales. “Visitors to Childhood’s End often speak of her with a kind of reverence, describing her as a kind of shaman or seer,” said gallery director Jonathan Happ.
The process of allowing meaning and emotion to emerge is nothing new for Frasca. But while her way of working didn’t change, the world did: The images in Refuge and Remedy were made during and after the pandemic, in an increasingly divided nation and an increasingly fractured world.
“I had arranged to do this one-person show years ago,” she said, “and in the process, the world fell apart. I’d look at the abstract images and I’d see horrible things because I’d been hearing about them. … I thought, ‘I’m going to have to cancel this show. I can’t work.’ ”
Frasca found her way through after she heard historian Heather Cox Richardson encouraging artists to work. “She said many artists she knew had trouble working during that time and that what the world needed was for them to work,” Frasca told Oly Arts.
She took strength, too, from a piece she’d made just before Donald Trump’s first inauguration. Called Becoming Zeus, the drawing shows a woman with a fierce mask and a sword. “I needed this guide to become a warrior,” she wrote in an artist’s statement.
Frasca drew what she saw, no matter how painful, and she began to see connection and kindness, people nurturing one another and animals, along with war and desolation.
“That’s why I call the show Refuge and Remedy,” she said. “When I went into the studio, it was a refuge. It let me get away from everything. Then I found these hopeful images. It was a remedy to have art in my life.”
Photos courtesy the Marilyn Frasca.
WHAT:
Refuge and Remedy
WHEN:
Through Nov. 16, 2025
WHERE:
Childhood’s End Gallery, 222 4th Ave. W, Olympia
LEARN MORE:
https://childhoods-end-gallery.com