Nov 15, 2025 - Dec 6, 2025

Varium et Mutabile semper femina

Gabrielle Reeves

Varium et Mutabile semper femina  — “Fickle and Ever Changing is Woman” — comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, where the phrase likens women to the shifting nature of water. Throughout the epic, rivers, seas, and storms reflect the emotional and political currents of the story.

This exhibition reclaims this metaphor, reframing fluidity not as weakness but as strength — a source of adaptation, survival, and power.

The paintings and drawings explore women’s experiences across time, weaving together personal memory and collective history. Water, especially swimming, appears as both a symbol and literal act of empowerment — a reclamation of space, a metaphor for resilience, and a meditative return to the self.

Human figures sometimes share the canvas with animals, emblems of untamed freedom, echoing the wild spirit we are born with and that society often seeks to contain.

Found objects and antique frames, heavy with history, contrast with the painted figures’ weightlessness, embodying the tension between constraint and liberation.

These works invite reflection on what it means to move through the world in a female body, and represent how women will always find a way out of their societal expectations. The way water will find a way out of a glass, eventually.