It has been nearly fifty years since the publication of the feminist essay “The Personal is Political.” The phrase has been the rallying cry of activists in the late 1960s and 1970s who sought to challenge traditional power relationships and structures by asserting that personal experience has larger social and political implications. Feminism, alongside anti-war and other civil rights movements, unmasked the totality of oppression and exclusion systematically perpetuated by the patriarchy.

Women artists in the 70s observed the call of “the personal is political” by examining their private lives and personal experiences, often using their own bodies as material and metaphor for the female struggle. They took on alternative practices, incorporating non-traditional materials that deliberately resist and question male-dominated painting and sculpture. Their work incited change on both social and aesthetic levels—it did not only promote gender equality, but it also called for more inclusive definitions of art.

In the exhibition Dark White Chakra, three young artists, who all happen to be women, come together to face both their personal and artistic predicaments. The exhibition serves as a means to access what they term as “an energy point, an alternative medicine to accept our black-and-white reality.” Finding themselves at a particular juncture in time, they all turn to the cathartic possibilities of art. Or, in their words, “zoning into a place where one feels a deep-seated connection with painting and opening up to the vulnerability of a picture.”

Gail Vicente explores her own long-standing anxieties with painting in “I Dreamt of Painting, I Painted My Dream,” a series of paintings in different formats: stretched, pinned, and hung from chains. The image of a mythical landscape, either seen through peepholes or cutouts or behind labyrinthine forms is common in all four paintings. This type of perspective is also present in a set of small paintings, entitled “Genuinely Confused,” in which the artist focuses on creating decidedly ambiguous forms for the viewer to decipher.

Marija Vicente similarly teases with a kind of private language through her motivational slogans turned into cryptic emblems in the series “Cipher Paintings.” In the first of the series, we see the same dream-like geography emanating from an experiment, which seemingly despite its good intentions, has somehow resulted in a farce or a tragic comedy. The other two paintings bear the mysterious codes accompanied by figures—wounded, chained, and locked in a stasis or trance.

Tanya Villanueva also attempts to articulate her immediate realities by “painting around the idea of making direct personal statements.” In the work, “The Nature of Ethos,” she masks an apology and a lament for renewal with glitter and confetti, a strategy she also applies to her other works, “Yuck,” “Everyone’s Lost at Sea Except Me” and “I am Feeling Today (ur my personal jihad),” to sugarcoat and at the same time shroud underlying desires and tensions with bedazzling embellishments.

In the center of the exhibition space, surrounded by the paintings, the gallery’s table was recouped as the stage for the three artists’ collaboration. Entitled “Working Classy,” the piece is a casually composed tableau of small, random abstract paintings, fabrics, broken ceramics, eggcups with clementines, miniature plaster bricks, chains, stones, and baubles that collectively signify both detritus and glamor.

Is the personal still political? Is this statement still relevant to today’s generation of young women? The artists in Dark White Chakra are quick to point out that friendship, and not politics, is the main premise for their coming-together for this exhibition. While they all claim to work from a “personal zone,” the term “personal” for them does not necessarily have to be politically motivated, or that our personal actions do not need to be aligned with social convictions and political beliefs all the time. By doing so, they reclaim the personal from the messy and often shallow and hackneyed political posturings which are so prevalent today.

Dark White Chakra is a liberating gesture: a coming-of-age for these three young artists who have already been likened to the Wayward sisters or the three witches in Macbeth, acting both as rebels and prophets of impending chaos and doom. By celebrating and wading through their shared personal darkness, they realize their own individual capacity for illumination and clarity.