Tabitha Vevers is a master of the intimate painting, creating work that’s not only small, but is best experienced within the same amount of headspace it takes to hold a private conversation. To really engage, you need to nuzzle up and get close—even though you might not like what you find. Seeing the handful of larger paintings in this mid-career survey, including her biggest at five feet across, only reinforces the resonant persuasion of what she can do with the minute.

With Vevers, it’s all about the details. Her work is a combination of the precious and pensive, an arresting narrative with a jittery, feminist agenda that draws you in with a flashy thrum of gold leaf and a seductive level of detail and craft. The pieces are quite beautiful, tasty confections with a sneaky sting in their tails. Start looking and things aren’t always what they appear to be. The fine brushwork and all the gold that glitters is actually a wicked foil to the often mercenary nature of Vevers’s cautionary tales.

Spanning sixty works over twenty years, Narrative Bodies is Tabitha Vevers’s first museum show and the swan song for former curator Rachel Rosenfield Lafo after twenty-four years at the DeCordova Museum. Vevers favors working in series and the DeCordova survey touches upon eight of them. Taking cues from pre-Renaissance masters, folk art, Indian miniatures, and surrealism, Vevers’s recounting of the experience of woman throughout history and mythology is, essentially, a form of atonement and restitution. By taking back from the traditional depiction of woman and re-examining it within the framework of personal experience, Vevers’s observations—on war, the sexes, corporate gluttony, and the sobering effects of ecological negligence—take on a private resonance.

For the Lover’s Eye series, Vevers revived the late eighteenth-century practice of eye portraiture. Originally, these locket-sized images of a paramour’s attentive gaze were intended as a romantic keepsake. Vevers took the form and adorned it with the eyes of women from art history: Victorine Meurent after Manet’s Olympia; the quiet downcast of The Adultress after Lucas Cranach; Lee Miller after Man Ray. Painted on ivory no bigger than an inch and a half around, and mounted within an appropriately ornate frame so that no piece is bigger than six inches, the eye portraits are hung together in an unsettling formation of disembodied stares. Besides generating tenfold all manner of questions about the power of the gaze, the way in which Vevers empowers possession of each stare back to its owner is a humbling and moving tribute to past lives.

If the Lover’s Eye is Vevers at her most poetic, then the Flying Dream series constitutes some of her most playful work. Working from her collection of other people’s dreams, they have a lighter, surreal touch. Using the ex-voto—a form of Mexican votive offering commonly painted on tin and steel—they’re life-affirming and joyous, but with a queasy undertone of cautious disbelief. Here, she’s at her most relaxed and humorous. The light is bright and the colors vivid as women perform aerial pirouettes and babies in parachutes flap over the sands of Truro, in Flying Lesson. They are wonderful paintings, as magical and humorous as the dreams they describe.

Vevers’s use of religious, devotional forms for secular means has long informed her work: the Mexican ex-voto; the altar-like framing of her Secular Icons; even the tight curvature of the Shell series Vevers likens to an apse within a church. Her marvelously canny hand at aligning materials and subject matter enriches the content of the work immensely. For her Women and Knives series, Vevers used knife-shaped bone and scrimshaw to portray sooty, monochromatic images of female murderers, creating a literal connection between the blade of the perpetrator and the bone of the victim.

Vevers has always had a propensity for making odd, sallow-looking figures with bony contours, gangly limbs, and pallid flesh. “Awkward expressiveness” she calls it; but in her newest work, the Eden series, the sexes have literally merged into mutations of multiple genitalia, shared breasts, and extra limbs. While these commentaries on environmental disaster and the schism between science and religion offer some of Vevers’s most apocalyptic work, the Eden series is, perversely enough, among her most beautiful. 

Clouds rain tears and the skies are overheated with horizons of radiant gold and a sun that hangs like the tired end of a burning cigarette. It’s a sci-fi world of acrid smoke, helter skelter factories, and hairless alien monstrosities. But the gold leaf is seamless, the surfaces waxy and luminous, and the modeling smooth and milky. With their stark, white box frames, they look like they come from the future.

Take Marsupedonna, an alarming configuration of toxic abnormality and maternal instinct that’s also one of her most indelible and devotional images. Vevers is able to leaven the somber proceedings with broad strokes of duplicitous humor, formal elegance, and a glimmer of hope. But true to form, there’s never enough sugar to cancel out the tart finish.

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