New Mythologies II: The Demise of the Storyteller
With Jeanine Brito, Charlotte Edey, Molly Greene, Mary Herbert, Grace Lee, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Grace Mattingly, Tristan Pigott, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Jakob Rowlinson, Salome Wu.
August 2022
Huxley-Parlour
New Mythologies II: The Demise of the Storyteller
With Jeanine Brito, Charlotte Edey, Molly Greene, Mary Herbert, Grace Lee, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Grace Mattingly, Tristan Pigott, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Jakob Rowlinson, Salome Wu.
With Jeanine Brito, Charlotte Edey, Molly Greene, Mary Herbert, Grace Lee, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Grace Mattingly, Tristan Pigott, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Jakob Rowlinson, Salome Wu.
I.
I’m looking at a picture on the internet - one picture divided into nine, smaller pictures, to be exact. Within each carefully delineated square is a version of the same scene, each a beautiful painting depicted in rich umbers, deep, mottled blues, and terracotta reds which surge viscously across the picture plane. In the distance a lake sprawls languidly, girdled by regal mountains; in the sky a sun sets, lazily. At the centre, an emerald figure stands upon a bridge. He is tormented, prophetic, austere. In some pictures, his eyes stare, obliquely, into the middle distance; his limbs hang, undelineated; his wet, red mouth is gorged open wide in a gesture of universal ennui. He is green and has a spikey felt collar, and - oh, it’s Kermit the Frog.
It’s nine pictures of Kermit the frog, depicted in the style of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, courtesy of DALL-E 2: a publicly available, and of late widely utilised, AI image generating software which allows users to generate realistic images of anything they like. The user’s choice here is comic - Munch’s The Scream is widely touted as a universal portrait of modern spiritual anguish. Funnily enough, Munch’s prevalent themes: mysticism, chronic illness, psychology, religious aspiration - remain unchanged, if added to, in this contemporary iteration. The painting still screams.
Aside from fantastic memes, the rise of dall-e marks a moment of unprecedented machine learning - granting the public with a god-like ability to merge, generate, and summon images at will. At the same time, it seems to speak to a contemporary zeitgeist - one where the common mode of existence is heterogeneity; here, feeds are lined with jarringly unrelated content: the war in Ukraine to lifehacks videos, celebrity gossip to climate disaster, nuclear armament to horoscopes. This comes, necessarily, with a prevalent sense of disenchantment, ennui, doom scrolling, powerlessness. It is in this long-horizoned landscape our exhibition operates. Munch’s Kermit the Frog does well to illustrate this modern, spiritual bankruptcy.
II.
There is a particular security that comes from texts that are old and sacred, whether they be classical, religious, or literary. Natalia Gonzalez Martin’s work takes from the legs of Adam and Eve on Jan Van Eyck’s fourteenth century Ghent altarpiece. Transplanted onto a de Chrico-esque, infinite horizon, the diptych’s limbs - soft, curvacious, glistening - are set into profane, narrative motion by the introduction of one glistening bead of moisture on Eve’s upper thighs. Jakob Rowlinson queers the archive with his BDSM iterations of english, pagan, folklore. Mask II depicts the green man - an foreboding symbol of reckoning with oncoming spring - replete with chains, heavy piercings, and decorative, leather perforations. Dangling from the ceiling with a permanently open mouth, Rowlinson’s juxtapositions here capitalise on the often forgotten sexual spirit of Early English and Germanic oral storytelling.
Jeanine Brito’s Something Borrowed, 2022, subverts the idea of the fairytale wedding. Here, a woman pouts floridly in marriage attire. Her almost theatrical gesture of sadness capitalises on the narrative potency of an unhappy bride - a jilt at the altar? An unwelcome marriage? Tristan Pigott’s Margaret of Antioch, 2022 references in hyperrealistic splendour the medeival Turkish Saint Margaret, who, having been eaten whole by the devil disguised as a dragon, escaped unscathed, with the aid of a crucifix. Strangely, despite adding to a millenia of artists who have chronicled Saint Margaret’s triumph over evil, the work also touches on the modern experience through form: the painting is hyperreal like a cartoon, smooth like a phone screen, and curled like an ageing poster at a train station. What parallel is being made here?
In a climate of external heterogeneity, the solid knowability of the body can also offer speculative, spiritual salve. Interiority and extremities are explored in depth by Alicia Reyes McNamara, whose paintings probe bodies, gender, sex, and specifically Latinx identity through alien, twisting figures. Relying on the imaginative potential of orifices and outlines, McNamara’s pieces explore self and other in blues. At the heart of Salomé Wu’s lustrous, blooming, Touched the Land with It’s Healing Hand, So Fleeting, 2022, is Wu’s own personal mythology - an extremely personal text she has been writing for several years, chronicling her own interior monologue. The colours of the piece - fleshy pinks and purples - indicate maybe even physically this radical interiority. Charlotte Edey’s diptych - Open, Close, 2022 - uses bodily forms to consider the ancient and alluring fear of seduction. The pieces are inspired by the Venus flytrap, and in particular its namesake, Aphrodite. The open and closed jaws which girdle Edey’s central drawings lend the works a primal paranoia regarding consumption, the destructive power of sensuality, Aphrodite’s trials under Hephaestus, and more broadly, the potent idea of the femme fatale.
Much as the surrealists used the power of dreams to counter a modernist, mortal anxiety, the works of Mary Herbert and Grace Mattingly harness the power of fantasy in their mythical canvases. Mattingly’s Girl and Lion, 2022, sees two characters wordlessly interfacing in a bucolic scene. The palette of the piece - orange, yellow, pink - lends a surreal otherworldliness. There is also enchantment in the work’s details: sumptuous, rolling, body-like hills in the distance; flashing claws in the foreground. As with Aesop’s fables, there is a thick, narrative tension in the scene. Both Mary Herbert’s One Door Closing, 2021, and Shore, 2022, capitalise on a diaristic sense of dreams half remembered, floating, faceless characters, and liminal boundaries - entryways, oceans, ghosts, to suggest a hazy fictional idea of elsewhere.
Perhaps Grace Lee is the only artist in the exhibition who explicitly mythologises the contemporary. Taking from current image economies (or what she terms ‘orphaned’ images) - infographics, shutterstock pictures, google image archives, tarot cards - to create quiet, darkly comic, and largely incomprehensible painting. The Opener, 2021, explores ideas of performance, production, exploitation. In cirque-du-soleil fashion, a fish theatrically expels the very water it needs to survive. The reference to Kim Kardashian’s 2014 Paper Magazine cover is coincidental, but not meaningless.
III.
In the early twentieth century, a man called Northrop Frye attempted to classify fairytale. His encylopaedic project saw him dividing all known stories into four cyclical and repeating narratives: there was the Comic, which explored the myth of birth; the Romance, which explored the myth of triumph, Tragedy which catered to the myth of fall, decay, separation, and finally Irony: the myth of chaos, death, darkness. These cycles represented ‘central unifying truths’, which not only saw a rational basis to storytelling, but also the human psyche itself. Frye’s project - while appealingly neat and contained - was widely criticised for extending the enlightenment urge to empiricise to the realm of the magical. Worse still, he was accused of simplifying myth down to science.
New Mythologies II instead addresses the urge to refute the rational in favour of play, fantasy, and storytelling. In a climate that places increasing weight on logic, order, structure, systems - more so than Frye ever could have imagined - our exhibition is neither escapist or emancipatory, calling on an enduring fascination with dream, legend, and fairytale to answer a contemporary ‘why’.
This text was both available as a designed print pamphlet and online.
In situ
Open, 2022, and Close, 2022. 
