Lane Vandeventer isn’t shy. An articulate woman with dark, inquisitive eyes and a pile of brown ringlets pulled up onto the crown of her head, Vandeventer leads through the crowded Steel Pond Gallery, speaking frankly about her exhibit—“MY BODY of work.” The show is a collection of artwork representing the female body.

Ten years ago, when Vandeventer was an art student and three months pregnant with her daughter, she was diagnosed with cancer of the cervix, vagina and uterus. Her doctor said the cancer could not be treated until after she gave birth.

“I had six months to go, knowing [the cancer] was growing inside me and there was nothing I could do about it,” Vandeventer says. “I had all these negative feelings about my sexuality and my sex organs.”

A friend told Vandeventer that she needed to find a way to reclaim her sexuality as beautiful—to “find [her] pearl,” in order to work through the experience.

Vandeventer explored her feelings artistically, from multiples of rough, wood-fired clay vaginas—“I’ve got tons of those at home,” she says, laughing—to mechanical reproductions and digital illustrations.

A decade later, the resulting work is on display at Steel Pond. One series of Xerox-based paintings features photocopies of synthetic hair swirling around a shiny white pearl and painted with skin-toned acrylics to celebrate the variety of women’s sexual organs. Each bears a woman’s name: “Janine,” “Maura” and so on.

Another series, “Anatomy Grid,” is composed of 24 small wooden panels with digital anatomical illustrations in a swanky, minimalist, ’60s graphic style. While Vandeventer’s work examines body parts that normally go unmentioned, it is executed with a designer’s flair and self-deprecating sense of humor.

Printed on vinyl sign material and stretched in a steel suspension frame, the piece “Last Feather” depicts Vandeventer’s head on the body of a plucked supermarket chicken, lying on a platter with a cherry in her mouth. She waves one symbolic feather—the last vestige of a coat of armor that Vandeventer says was stripped away during her illness and treatment.

Most of the work is recent, suggesting a long incubation period that Vandeventer says was due to her reticence about displaying such personal work. Perhaps her boldness also is a recent development.

“The chicken is me, calling myself a chicken,” she says. “It took me 10 years to come out with this work.”

“We’re raised to believe that if you talk about your sexuality, you must be loose,” she says. While other artists have certainly represented the double standard in female sexuality before, Vandeventer says her work succeeds when it “gets people to talk about their own sexuality and their own insecurities—to pull off those feathers.”

The Oregonian

Steel Pond Gallery, 1905 NW 26th Ave., explores female sexuality with raw, uncensored images of the vagina, reproductive organs and self-exploration in My Body of Work by Lane Vandeventer, through Sept. 18. Features a giant vulva you can walk through!

Just Out Magazine

When she was pregnant with her daughter, Lane Vandeventer was diagnosed with cervical and vaginal cancer. Because of the pregnancy, doctors couldn’t operate until the baby was born — and so grew the tumors.

While ultimately the artist’s daughter was born healthy and the cancer was contained, the experience left Vandeventer with a psychological complex: she had grown to fear and loathe her vagina.

Now, 10 years later, she has addressed and surmounted this negativity through MY BODY of work, an ode to femalia in the vein of Inga Muscio’s groundbreaking tome, Cunt.

Vandeventer, a graphic designer by day, has superimposed her own face and pubic hair onto digital illustrations on panels, sometimes overpainting them in acrylics.

One part of the show has gallery-goers stepping through a gargantuan vinyl labia into a red-carpeted, red-walled room hung with works portraying the artist herself as a plucked chicken on a platter, legs splayed and relevant organs displayed in vivid close-up.

No question, it’s odd and vaguely off-putting to see a chicken with a woman’s face and anthropomorphic genitalia, and while this work falls short of the maturity and abstract finesse of another feminist artist, Julia Fenton, it nevertheless succeeds as a whimsical yet transgressive catalyst for thought on female body image and the relationship between gender identity and genital identity.

— Richard Speer · Art critic, curator, author, ARTFORUM contributor

Curators Michael Merrill, Travis Pond and Lane Vandeventer have collaborated on a show that could be described as a series of inverted Rorschach tests.

The three curators have gathered the work of more than 70 artists, each of whom has been given the task of reinterpreting one of the 52 playing cards.

So, what’s on the minds of many of our brightest and best artists? From the compromising position of the queen of spades to the engorgements of the seven of hearts, sex seems to be the dominant theme for many of the artists, some of whom are familiar Portland names.

This looks like an exuberant sampling of various obsessions, vividly realized. But for the PG-minded, perhaps too close to an R-rating.

The Oregonian — The Art Nucleus, 1905 N.W. 26th Ave.

#22 — Lane Vandeventer · A Balance Between Two Forces

“The balance in nature is verified, as when a rain-filled leaf overflows.”

Lake Oswego Arts — Downtown

First 45 — a gala scholarship benefit group show.

Lane Vandeventer was the youngest member and a featured artist in the exhibition, showing welded steel sculpture.

First 45 · Gala Scholarship Benefit Group Show