Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker
Opening Friday, January 10th, 6 – 8:30pm
January 10—February 15, 2025
Alex Jovanovich, Alex Stark, Amber Cowan, An Ngoc Pham, Angela Fraleigh, Anya Kielar, Bridget Mullen, Darina Karpov, Elissa Bromberg, Graham Collins, Jennie Jieun Lee, Jessica Stoller, Johannes VanDerBeek, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Kate MacDowell, Leigh Barbier, Lindsay Montgomery, Lizzie Wright, Mala Iqbal, Marcelo Canevari, Marta Thoma Hall, Nicole Burko, Ornella Pocetti, Rebecca Morgan, Robin Schavoir, Sara VanDerBeek, Sarah Peters, Utē Petit, Valerie Hegarty, Vera Iliatova
Curated by Valerie Hegarty
I made art in the basement as a kid. In this subterranean space, with materials I scavenged around the house and in the trash, I explored my bodily anxieties over the stories I overhead from my surgeon father’s nights in the ER, my confusion over my vivid nightmares, and my un-welcomed but staunch belief in ghosts. I destroyed most of what I made, as what I created didn’t look happy, or cute, or resemble what other children made. Now as an artist with a twenty-year career, I still have moments of wanting to censor my work, but I find inspiration in other artists that play in the shadows, fearlessly following their visions into the night, and letting run amuck, whatever golems are bred.
When Mindy first asked me to curate a deeper, darker version of the previous Fairyland show in 2021, I immediately thought of a painting by Darina Karpov that became a touchstone for the show. Thaw, is a small oil painting of a snow-suited figure carrying a child, crossing an endlessly creviced terrain of arctic tundra. Darina made the painting when we were studio mates, as we listened heavy-hearted to news reports of her native Russia invading Ukraine, as she gave her parents instructions in Russian about when to pick up her young daughter so she could have another hour of studio time. In her painting I saw motherhood as a treacherous journey of protection. I saw immigrants forced to make dangerous crossings. I saw mothers and children fleeing war in the dead of winter.
Here the development of the show took a parallel track: There is the form and content of the artworks themselves and then there are the artists as I know them, in their messy lives—in their unheated studios and cacophony of teaching jobs—as we cross paths at colleges, on subways, at openings, at psychiatrist offices, in recovery meetings, as partners, friends, neighbors, and admirers of each other’s art in virtual space. I think of the artists in the show also as fairies living in a deeper, darker Fairyland: artists as witches, as shamans, as soothsayers—endlessly arranging and juggling each aspect of their lives to create the conditions needed for their own alchemy.
These 29 artists mine biography, history, folktales and mythology to subvert gender roles, resist stereotypes, and reckon with historical trauma. Working in a variety of materials including paint, ceramics, glass, bronze, and mixed media, there are mythical mashups, misbehaving bodies, cautionary tales, morality taunts, feminist remakes, existential wrestling, and new lives birthed with glitches. Sifting through the compost of dark histories and decaying conventions, these artists churn fertile earth to cultivate and bloom a new order—a new Fairyland—Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker.