MONTEREY HERALD, JUNE 1996

...excerpt from Rick Deragon's Art Scene

        "The self-taught Ms. Tonty has created a dream-like world of illogical relationships, metamorphosing animals, and contradictory spaces. In changing scale, interiors become exteriors, intimate spaces and inanimate objects become lively creatures while maintaining their mechanical characteristics.        
         Like Alice's Wonderland, replete with rabbits, clocks, and little girls, Ms. Tonty's drawings present one disturbing scene after another, then diffuse the jarring image with glib, black humor.
         Multiple images within each drawing seem to bombard the eye relentlessly. Like the mental montage of nightmares, bizarre juxtapositions are drawn, the mind logs the image in the memory, and attempts to determine meanings. Connections are made and destroyed as associations are recalled and thwarted.  
         The possible meanings derived from the various imaginative associations in Ms. Tonty's drawings impart a potent life to her work. Unfolding over time, like a feature film, the phantasmagorical reality that Ms. Tonty has developed approximates the effect of an eminently satisfying, well-populated dream or nightmare."