Exhibit Seated in Teenage Nostalgia

Funny, there’s no Clearasil chair.

Six local artists recalled the pains and occasional joys of adolescence to inspire a group-art work called “Teen Encounter Group” that goes on exhibit Saturday in a Beverly Hills art gallery.

The work consists of six chairs, arranged in a circle, each decorated to reflect the artist’s own teen years, from once-essential bouffant hairdos to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

The artists are members of the Art Colony of Valley Village, a group of middle-aged women who decided in January 2000 that they would rather paint than take Prozac to deal with personal problems--which ranged from aging parents to agents who didn’t call.

Self-trained, the women meet once or twice a week at members’ homes in the San Fernando Valley for an afternoon of painting and mutual support.

Actress Marilyn Kentz’s chair features a broken heart and the torso of a mannequin that has fallen through the seat. For Kentz, both are symbols of how her world crumbled when she was 14 and her father suddenly died.

“This is the first time I’ve admitted that shadow side of me--how sad I was at that time,” said Kentz, a co-founder of the Art Colony.

A bra also appears on her chair because, she said, “when you are a teenage girl you really wear your breasts on the outside whether you want to or not.”

Kentz decorated her chair with photos of students taken from a high school yearbook. But they’re not from her own yearbook, which she couldn’t bear to harm.

“He has no clue, but I ripped up my husband’s yearbook,” she said. “If he really wants to look up a friend, he can look at the chair.”

Angst is a major theme of the installation. Ana Iris Paniagua’s chair is topped with a bridal veil but is dark and ominous. It recalls the night the El Salvador native was brutalized by the older man to whom she was engaged. She was 14.

The perkiest chair was created by actress Caryl Kristensen, who insists she was a happy teen. Kristensen was homecoming queen at her Orange County high school.

“I grew up behind the Orange Curtain,” said Kristensen, who spent her teen years in Fullerton.

The top part of her Adirondack-style chair wears a tube top, recalling Kristensen’s uniform as a teenager, which included Ditto brand jeans and then-ubiquitous Candies shoes.

“If I could have found a pair of Candies I would have put them there, too,” she said.

Psychologist Darlene Graeser created a chair that embodies the age-old conflict between parent and teen. On the back, adolescent side of the chair is a skull, an adolescent icon that makes parents crazy. The parents’ side features the mantra: “No, you may not pierce your . . .”

The circular arrangement of the six chairs is intended to suggest a teenage self-help group. The woman have also done paintings on the theme of adolescence, of special interest to them now because several have teenage children.

The show begins Saturday at Gallery 258, at 258 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills, and continues through July 29.

While the chairs are not for sale, a portion of the sale of any paintings will benefit Teen Line, a nonprofit organization that maintains a peer hotline for teens.