Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker
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.
About the Artists
Alex Jovanovich is an artist and writer who lives in the Bronx. He is also a senior editor at ARTFORUM.
Amber Cowan’s sculptural glass work is based around the use of recycled, up-cycled, and second-life American pressed glass and industrial scrap. She uses the process of flame-working, hot-sculpting and glassblowing to create sculptures that overwhelm the viewer with ornate abstraction and viral accrual. Her work incorporates collected antique glass elements that are used to activate and animate the material into a visual story of historic objects through a contemporary lens.
Angela Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University School of Art and her BFA from Boston University. Her solo exhibitions include PPOW Gallery and Hirschl and Adler Modern in New York, Inman Gallery in Houston, and Peters Projects in Santa Fe. She has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and has been the recipient of several awards and residencies including the Yale University Alice Kimball English grant, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Brooklyn, NY, The CORE program in Houston, TX and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE among others.
Elissa L. Bromberg is a sculptor and visual artist exploring the raw essence of the human connection and transformation through the medium of clay. Over the past six years, her focus has been on creating figurative work. Previously her work has been exhibited at such venues as Here Arts Gallery, Hebrew Union College Museum, The Factory, The Castle Gallery, and the Muroff-Kotler Visual Arts Gallery. A retired art therapist and former professor in the Graduate Art Therapy Departments at New York University and the College of New Rochelle, she lives in New Paltz, NY and works at her studio in Kingston, NY.
Jennie Jieun Lee (b. Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Sullivan County, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Martos Gallery, New York, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, The Pit, Glendale, LA, Marlborough Gallery, New York. She is the recipient of several grants including Art Matters, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and Artadia. She has been a lecturer of ceramics at New York University, Princeton University and currently is a Professor of the Practice at SMFA@Tufts in Boston, MA. She has upcoming solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut and Nicelle Beauchene in NYC.
Johannes Vanderbeek coming soon
Jonathan Ehrenberg’s work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, The Drawing Center, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Essex Flowers (New York), Futura Center (Prague), The B3 Biennial (Frankfurt), Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn), and Nara Roesler (São Paulo). He has participated in residencies at LMCC Workspace, Harvestworks, Skowhegan, Triangle, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Glenfiddich in Scotland, and Shandaken: Storm King, and his work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Art in America. He received a BA from Brown University, and an MFA from Yale, and teaches at Lehman College, CUNY. He was born in New York, NY, where he currently lives and works.
Leigh Barbier was born and raised in Los Angeles. She relocated to the Bay Area to attend San Francisco State University where she received her BA in Fine Arts. She currently has a full time studio practice in San Francisco, creating, drawings, paintings and sculptures. Her work has appeared extensively in the Bay Area in one person, two person and group shows over the last 3 decades, including The de Young Open, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Berkeley Art Center. In addition Leigh has also exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Paris.
Leigh worked for 20 years as a practical model maker and digital painter for George Lucas’ company, Industrial, Light and Magic and later Disney Studios. She has created masks, puppets, props, graphics and animation for the San Francisco group, The Residents.
Lizzie Wright lives and works in NYC and the Catskills. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and has exhibited at a variety of spaces including Catskill Art Space, Halsey McKay Gallery, Marinaro Gallery, Rawson Projects, Essex Flowers and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. Her work has been reviewed by various publications including The Brooklyn Rail and The New Yorker.
Marcelo Canevari (b. 1984, Argentina) formerly trained and worked as an illustrator of Argentinian nature, participating in scientific dissemination projects at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences and the National Parks Administration. When he was a child, he learnt to paint from his late father who was a biologist and an illustrator, and they would often paint natural landscapes together until a pivotal accident that inspired Canevari to further explore his imaginations for inspiration.
Marta Thoma Hall is an American painter and sculptor based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Kauai, HI. As an artist she is known for her unique juxtaposition of imagery with a surreal bent. She exhibits art and unusual installations of steel and glass across the United States, and Costa Rica. Thoma Hall studied fine arts at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. In 2022 she founded Hall Art + Technology Foundation (HATF), an educational arts foundation focused on the intersection of art and science in the modern world.
Ornella Pocetti was born in Buenos Aires in 1991. She studied at the University of National Arts in Argentina (UNA) and continued attending different workshops and programs. In 2015, she had her first solo show, “Defying time“ at Acéfala Gallery (Bs As, Argentina). In 2019 she was selected to participate in “Artistas x Artistas”, at Munar Art Center.
Rebecca Morgan received a BA from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from Pratt Institute, NY. Press for her work includes The New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, ARTnews, Whitehot Magazine, Beautiful Decay, Artslant, Juxtapoz Magazine, The Huffington Post, Paper Magazine, and Berlin’s Lodown Magazine. She is the recipient of residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts Residency, a Vermont Studio Center full fellowship, and the George Rickey Residency at Yaddo, among others.
Valerie Hegarty‘s solo exhibitions include Malin Gallery, Nicelle Beauchene, NY; Marlborough Gallery Chelsea; Locust Projects, Miami; Museum 52, London; The MCA in Chicago; and Guild & Greyshkul, NY, among others including a commission for a public sculpture on the High Line, NY and a show of site-specific installations in The Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms. Selected group exhibitions in NY include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, D’Amelio Terras Gallery, Derek Eller, White Columns and MoMA PS1. Hegarty has been awarded numerous grants through foundations such as the Colene Brown Art Prize, The Adolph Gottleib Foundation, The Pollock Krasner Foundation (2x grantee), The New York Foundation for the Arts (2x grantee), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and Campari NY. Residencies include LMCC, Marie Walsh Sharpe, PS 122, MacDowell, Yaddo and Smack Mellon
Alex Stark is an artist and curator working between Boulder, CO and Chicago, IL. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. Stark’s works are an amalgamation of observed and dream-like imagery with figures that relate to the idea of self and act as an avatar or spiritual self-representation.
An Ngoc Pham has exhibited at Eric Firestone Gallery. Additional group shows include Satchel Projects, Mother-in-Law Gallery and Halsey McKay Gallery.
Anya Kielar
Bridget Mullen holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a BAE from Drake University. She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Jan Van Eyck Academie, The Lighthouse Works, Roswell Artist-In-Residence Program, The Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell, and Fountainhead, among others.
Darina Karpov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and received her early academic training at the preparatory school for the Repin Academy of Art continuing at the Moscow Institute of Technology. After moving to the US she studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and MFA program at the Yale School of Art. She is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York where she has had six solo shows. She also exhibited with Hales Gallery, London and was included in group shows at Neuberger Museum, DeCordova Museum, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Graham Collins (b. 1980, Washington, D.C.) received his BFA from the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC and his MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Notable solo exhibitions include Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, OR; Jacob Bjorn, Aarhus, Denmark The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium; Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, France and Jonathan Viner Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
Working in the realm of figurative sculpture, Jessica Stoller (b. 1981) mines the rich and complicated history of porcelain, harnessing its links to power, desire, and taste. Synthesizing the cultural, historical, and corporeal notions of the female body, Stoller expands the feminist visual vernacular and makes space for subversion, defiance, and play. For Stoller the ‘grotesque’ becomes a powerful tool to challenge patriarchal power structures, as female figures flaunt what they are told to hide, reveling in their own pleasure and abjection. Stoller lives and works in West New York, NJ.
Kate MacDowell’s hand-built porcelain sculptures respond to environmental threats and their consequences, revealing the rifts and frictions between man and nature. Based out of Portland, Oregon, her work has been shown throughout the US and Europe at Scope Miami and New York, Seattle Art Fair, ArtAmsterdam, Art London, London Art Fair, Showoff Paris, Art Paris, Solo Project Basel, NEXT and Art Chicago fairs. She was an artist in residence at the Kohler Arts and Industry Program and has had work in group exhibits in the Museum of Arts and Design (NY), Banksy’s Dismaland Bemusement Park, MOCA North Miami and Virginia, Urban Nation Museum Berlin, the Fuller Craft Museum and the Muskegon, Akron, Crocker, Biggs, Everson, Canton and Asheville Art Museums.
Lindsay Montgomery is a Canadian artist working across a variety of media including ceramics, painting and puppetry to create objects, and performances. Her work is focused on creating mythologies that confront and re-imagine classical narratives to address a wide range of topics and issues including: death and mysticism, feminism, and evolving modes of power. She earned a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and received her MFA from the University of Minnesota.
Mala Iqbal was born in the Bronx in 1973 and grew up in a household where three cultures and four languages intersected.
Her most recent solo show was “The Edge of an Encounter” with JJ Murphy Gallery, NYC in October 2024. Other solo shows were at Soloway Gallery, Ulterior Gallery, Bellwether Gallery and PPOW in New York, Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia, and Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. A series of collaborative paintings made with Angela Dufresne was on view at LSU College of Art & Design’s Glassell Gallery in 2023. Iqbal’s work has been exhibited in group shows throughout the United States as well as in Australia, China, Europe and India. Her work has been reviewed in various publications including Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Village Voice and The New Yorker.
Robin Schavoir is a filmmaker, writer and painter living in upstate New York.
Sara VanDerBeek was born in Baltimore in 1976 and lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek at the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, North Carolina (with Stan VanDerBeek) and Women & Museums at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (both 2019). Sara VanDerBeek has had additional exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and Whitney Museum, New York. VanDerBeek’s work was included in the inaugural New Visions Triennial for Photography and New Media at the Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden, Norway (2020). She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kunsthalle Berlin; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Sarah Peters received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA from The University of Pennsylvania and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She is a recipient of awards and residencies including the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, John Michael Kohler Artist Residency, WI; New York Foundation for the Arts; The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and The Sharpe-Wallentas Studio Program.
Utē Petit was the winner of the third annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2022) and recipient of the Marsha P. Johnson Starlight Fellowship (2023). She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence) in 2018. Her work has been included in exhibitions at New Orleans African American Museum (New Orleans), Oakland Avenue Urban Farm (Detroit), and Library Street Collective (Detroit). Loyal Gallery, Swivel Gallery. She’s represented by Swivel Gallery.
Vera Iliatova received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, with further study at the Skowhegan School of Art (2004) and a residency at Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation (2007/2008). In 2023, Iliatova received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant that supported the production of The Drawing Lesson at Nathalie Karg Gallery. In 2018, Iliatova was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting.
