AJ Vanderelli is on the lookout for magic in ‘Catch Me If You Can’

AJ Vanderelli described the year leading to her early spring move into a new house as volatile, marked by short stays in scattered apartments and accompanied by a creative dry spell.

“I think to a certain degree [chaos] is good for my process, and it does lend itself to help me in a lot of ways,” Vanderelli said this week at RAW Gallery, where her new exhibition, “Catch Me If You Can,” kicks off with an opening reception from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27. “But when it’s too much, and when you’re constantly getting the shit kicked out of you, you’re just trying to survive, right? And then it’s almost impossible to have time to think, to create.”

The urge to create returned once the artist settled into a routine at her new place, which involves morning walks with her dog, Matilda, and working a couple days a week with artist Henry Hess (Vanderelli received her certification to work as a home health care provider in June 2024). But where her earlier paintings generally centered on figurative work, the characters that emerged in her recent output were more illustrative, more playful.

“I had this piece of wood, and I was just playing around, painting on it, and it was like, who is this guy? Where did he come from?” said Vanderelli, who used this first rabbit-like figure as a springboard to a series of paintings that depict a surrealist world populated by cartoonish winged puffballs and creeping, beetle-esque creatures. “I typically don’t create artwork like this, and I usually work from life. But maybe I’m just sick of reality now because it’s so screwy.”

Vanderelli drew additional inspiration for the series from a pair of past creations, including a small painted box whose four sides depict a romantic relationship from first spark to implosion, and a bug-centric exhibition she curated at WitchLab last year that had its roots in a decades-old journal entry written by her late mother. 

“Her teacher told of an incident where Alicia (AJ), while holding a fly in her left hand, sat at the lunch table eating her bologna sandwich with her right,” Vanderelli’s mother wrote. “One night, unbeknown to us until the next day, she fell asleep with a roly poly … clutched in her chubby fist. She awakened in a tizzy as her bed partner had escaped. Please, Alicia, don’t sleep with bugs in your hands.”

The box, titled “Grounded” and also on display in the exhibition at RAW Gallery, emerged unexpectedly in the wake of a brief romantic relationship, with Vanderelli painting four interconnected scenes that she later related to the recurring cycle of human connection and heartbreak. “This first one is destiny, where you’re destined to connect through the universe,” Vanderelli said, drawing my attention to a pair of creatures joined by a bolt of lightning. “And then it’s like, oh, gosh, you broke my heart, and there’s love and destruction. And then this last [panel], I see her as being the universe, continuing to spread her magic. … And then it repeats.”

While Vanderelli created this new body of work in part to escape current realities – the artist pointed to the recent press conference in which President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. promoted a scientifically dubious link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism as just one example – there are aspects of modern society that managed to seep through, most explicitly in the ways her cartoonish cast of characters continue to prey on one another.

“That’s why I decided to call it ‘Catch Me If You Can,’ because I know you’re coming for me, but I don’t know if you’ll get me,” said Vanderelli, who added that at its core the work is rooted in a desire to rediscover a sense of wonder in the wake of a tumultuous stretch, and at a time when the world feels engineered to stomp out that want. “And if you look, [the characters] are still searching, and there’s this magic and playfulness. … And I think it’s because I’ve been internalizing that idea and working through it on the canvas.”