Yonah C. Riel
A Canadian artist based in Eugene Oregon, Yonah first encountered the women of Surrealism as a student at San Francisco State in the 1970s and has drawn on them as role models ever since. In an era when women in art were expected to sit still and be looked at, these artists created the work and sent their own voices out into the world.
Yonah works in mixed-media collage, building reliquary-style shadowboxes that honor these overlooked women. Her work is shown through New Zone Gallery in Eugene.
These are women I have never met, and I have known them for fifty years. Leonor Fini, Agnes Pelton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Hilma af Klint and Ithell Colquhoun. I found them as a student at San Francisco State, they have been my companions, my role models and my imaginary friends ever since.
Each shadowbox is a reliquary. A reliquary holds what is precious and keeps it safe, so each box holds a small world assembled from fragments of the women's own paintings. They speak in their own images, their own symbols, their own strange and luminous landscapes.
Many boxes bring more than one woman together. The conversation begins at my worktable, where I sit with their work and listen, and it continues inside the box, where their worlds meet and answer one another.
The series grows one conversation at a time, and I don't yet know where it ends.
The Creators: A Tribute to Agnes Pelton, Leonor Fini
and Georgia O'KeeffeAlchemy is underway before the eye even knows it — Agnes Pelton's Alchemy (1937–39) vibrates beneath the surface, emanating translucent light from below. From that glow rises a figure in a shimmering dress, rendered with a mastery that seems to generate its own radiance. She is Leonor Fini's The Guardian of the Red Egg (1955), caught in the act of gifting that which she has birthed, the red egg cradled in her hands. Behind her, Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed (1938) opens like a second sun, the whole scene shifting our consciousness even as we witness it. At either side stand two guardians, cut from Fini's Anthropomorphic Wardrobe (1939). Unyielding in their catlike beauty, the sphinxes ensure the ritual will be honored. Below, two attendants from Fini's Le Voile (1956) draw the veil aside, completing the rite.
The Rebirthing:
A Tribute to Ithell Colquhoun, Hilma af Klint and Agnes PeltonThis piece brings together Ithell Colquhoun's Gouffres Amers (1939), with Hilma af Klint's Tree of Knowledge (1913–15) and Agnes Pelton's Even Song (1934) — a lineage of women who painted what lies beneath and beyond the visible. The deep chasm of Gouffres Amers, decaying yet tender, becomes the ground from which af Klint's tree rises, carrying what the chasm holds upward into bloom. Pelton's vessel glows where the canopy gathers, her star above it like a held breath. This is less a mourning than a recognition that death, too, is a kind of flowering.
De Fem (The Five):
A Tribute to Hilma af Klint, Anna Cassel and Their CircleIn 1913, Hilma af Klint and Anna Cassel worked together on paintings for a temple that would never be built in their lifetimes. They were two of five women who called themselves De Fem, "The Five" — meeting for years to draw and paint what came through them at their Friday–night séance table. This piece imagines that table. Above, af Klint's Altarpiece, Group X: No. 2 (1915) pours it's golden sunlight down through a narrowing triangle, flanked by symbols from the notebooks they kept. A channeling figure, drawn from Remedios Varo's Hermit (1955), bridges what's received above to what's recorded below — where Varo's own final painting, Still Life Reviving (1963), becomes the restless, luminous table itself.
Five women. One pursuit.
The Non-Binary Botany Lesson:
A tribute to Leonor Fini, Agnes Pelton and Hilma af KlintTwo figures rise from the golden cauldron — one fully formed, ivory and certain; one still shelled, still deciding what she will be. Between them moves an energy neither can claim. The figures are drawn from Leonor Fini's The Botany Lesson (1974); the cauldron and the purple spires come from Agnes Pelton's Alchemy (1937–39). From the cauldron the energy rises and blossoms into a golden calla lily, its ovaries exposed -— the alchemical process made visible. Then the energy rises into the mushroom — the fruiting, composting form, drawn from Hilma af Klint's Tree of Knowledge series (1913–15) — where what the flower knew breaks down and disseminates. Two becomes three becomes one again.
The Passage, Reimagined:
A Tribute to Kay Sage and Agnes PeltonThe central figure in this piece is drawn from Kay Sage's The Passage (1956) — created just a year after the death of her husband, the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy. The original work carries the weight of that grief: stark, bleached and desolate. Knowing that Sage would take her own life less than a decade later, I felt compelled to offer her a different ending. In this reimagining, her solitary figure moves not through emptiness but through the radiant inner world of Agnes Pelton's Mother of Silence (1933). Pelton, another visionary and underrepresented woman artist working in the early twentieth century, painted otherworldly light from a place of deep spiritual stillness. Together, these two women share a quieter, more luminous passage. This piece is an act of imaginative rescue: a softer world for Kay Sage to rest in.
The Mother of Us All: A Tribute to Agnes Pelton and Ithell ColquhounBathed in the pale lunar glow of Agnes Pelton’s Light Center (1947–48), a figure drawn from Ithell Colquhoun’s Attributes of the Moon (1947) rises before a cascade of hearts from Colquhoun’s Diagrams of Love: The Tree of Veins I (c. 1940–41). Red lines thread from her crown to her fingertip, a map of feeling made visible. From the same painting, a seed-leaf takes root in her open hand. She is made of clouds, earth and fire. Her work is tending: the elements rise into the light, then return to quicken the soil. Two visionaries who never shared a room, gathered into one reliquary body: lit by moonlight, mother to a lineage still unfolding.
The Convocation:
A Tribute to Leonora Carrington and Remedios VaroA sacred space has been called into being. On the left, a young Leonora Carrington — vibrant, unbroken — poses with the pregnant hyena, a declaration of independence. On the right, Remedios Varo's solitary timekeeper keeps her vigil at the threshold. At center, a cosmic arch opens into starlight, the shared magic of two lifetimes rising from an open book. As in their lives, they dwell in parallel play – each absorbed in their art-making, answering the same alchemical call.
The Beauty and the Beholder: a tribute to Leonor Fini, Hilma af Klint, and Georgia O'Keefe.The sphinx has always guarded the threshold between what is known and what must be learned through riddle. She rises here from Hilma af Klint's Tree of Knowledge, #1 (1913–15), while her wings and the crowned disc above her head are drawn from two versions of af Klint's The Swan; #1 and #9 (1913–15). Her body comes from Leonor Fini's Sfinge la morte (1973), regal and unhurried, entirely at ease with her own strangeness — a sphinx who wears death itself as one more riddle to keep. Behind her, Georgia O'Keeffe's Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu (1943) stands watch — ancient, sun-worn, indifferent to the mysteries unfolding at their feet. She does not ask to be understood. She asks only that you look — and in looking, that you become willing to be changed by what looks back.
The Cauldron:
A Tribute to Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint and Leonora CarringtonThree artists, working across a century, distill their energies into a single cauldron. Agnes Pelton supplies the both current and the container: her Alchemy (1937-39) rises as the purple smoke from a golden glow edging the piece, while her The Voice (1930) unfurls into the white flames that lick the cauldron's rim. At the head sits Hilma af Klint's Tree of Knowledge (1913) — a mushroom-crowned heart, the chamber where gathered energies condense before they descend. And kneeling below, receiving what has been distilled, is a fragment of Leonora Carrington's The Bath (El Baño, 1957) — her figure turned inward, spine lit like a wick, transmuting what arrives as current into what she holds as insight.
A Conversation with the MessengersThis piece pairs Ithell Colquhoun's The Trees (1941) with Remedios Varo's Encounter (1959) and Agnes Pelton's Messengers (1932); three women who each painted a boundary opening. Colquhoun's rainbow, arcing between two hollow trunks, support this figure's head — she thinks through root and spectrum, not only skull. Varo's seated woman, lifting the lid on her own reflected eyes, becomes the body at the table, caught in the act of finding herself. Pelton's messengers move as the current between them. There is no message waiting elsewhere to be delivered. She is the crossing itself — root, rainbow, open box — where receiving and sending are the same gesture."
The Portal: A tribute to Georgia O'keeffeThis collage brings together three of Georgia O'Keeffe's most iconic works: the White Place (1940), Jimsonweed (1936) and Summer Days (1936). They are brought together to create an imagined world in which the artist herself steps into the landscape she made legendary.
A small figure of Georgia stands at the base of her own giant jimsonweed (a portal of sorts) facing the great white cliffs rising before her. Above one of her iconic skulls presides like a watchful spirit. She is at a portal: between human and monumental, between painter and painted, inhabiting once again the world her visions created.
The Reunion: A Tribute to Remedios Varo and Leonora CarringtonThis collage brings together three surrealist masterworks to create a new mythological space. The stage is set within Leonora Carrington's alchemical interior Ab Eo Quod (1956), its Latin inscription warning of hidden transformations. Into this charged space steps the owl-headed Remedios Varo from The Creation of Birds (1957), and to meet her the horse-headed figure from Carrington's own Edwardian Hunt Breakfast (1956). Together they enact the reunion that history denied them: two women who once drank together, cast spells and painted alongside one another in Mexico City in the 1940s and 50s, now returned to a shared table in an imagined afterlife of artmaking.
The Transmutation: A tribute to Ithell Colquhoun, Agnes Pelton,
and Hilma af KlintThree visionaries converge into a single figure, caught in the midst of a transformation. Ithell Colquhoun's alchemical union of opposites gives the figure its structure; Agnes Pelton's twilit atmosphere allows everything to breathe; Hilma af Klint's mushroom lends its helical stem, tracing how energy moves through a body. All three speak to a single theme: as above, so below - an alchemical truism that was reintroduced during the Hermetic Revival.
Unmoored, at midnight in love:
a tribute to Leonor Fini, Agnes Pelton, and Ithell ColquhounThree visionary women painters each contribute a piece to the nocturnal voyage. First the stage is set: two luminous vessels mirrored from Pelton's Star Gazer (1929) stand like twin sentinels holding the horizon's last light. Behind them a white flame-crown erupts from Pelton's The Voice (1930), a call heard rather than seen. Answering is a gold, vein-threaded heart-tree drawn from Ithell Colquhoun's The Tree of Veins (1940–41) rises, its branches both rooted and reaching. And carrying it all forward, adrift beneath a midnight sky, is the canoe itself — borrowed from Leonor Fini's Voyage sans amarres (1986), a title that translates to "voyage without moorings." It's Fini's boat, fittingly, that gave this piece its unmoored heart: a vessel with no destination, only a voice ahead calling it on.