Fairy Tails
This group exhibition explores the wondrous in nature by reconsidering the role of animals in storytelling. These works present fantastical narratives in which animals preside over strange episodes: tales are rewritten or unwritten, travellers embark on uncertain journeys, danger lurks deep in the forest, a witch appears from nowhere, birds and beasts are spellbound, clothing is enchanted, and a shoe materializes, as if magically spun from gold. If animals are “good to think with,” as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once famously remarked, then folk and fairy tales have a long history of speaking through beasts, whose otherworldly transformations can express our innate or unconscious longings and desires.
Anne Koval on Fairy Tails
Visiting Artist Talk with Meryl McMaster
Visiting Artist Talk with Laura Vickerson
Publication
Foreword by Emily Falvey
Essay by Anne Koval
Designed by Robert Tombs
Published by Owens Art Gallery
Download PDF
