"Truth, Lies, and Fairy Tales"
WheelHouse Art is pleased to present Truth, Lies, and Fairy Tales, a group exhibition featuring Matthew McDole, Colleen Merrill, Elsa Hansen Oldham, and Monica Stewart. This exhibition opens with a reception for the artists on Friday, December 8, 6:00 - 8:00pm with a talk with the artists at 7:00pm.
The exhibition continues through January 20, 2024.
“Fake news” and “post-truth” are terms that have seeped into popular culture’s lexicon in recent years. But even if the terms are new, the experiences that give them meaning aren’t so new.
Obfuscation of the details that validate the truth of a story has always provided color to the gray areas that teach what we believe to be true. Kernels of truth pepper the construction of myths to either make them more believable or at least make us more empathetic to the characters and stories.
Fables, folklore, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and rumors. These are all variations of ways in which we share “news” or stories to pass along our idealizations of life or warnings of that which may threaten our lives.
The truths we find in myths are less a record of events, and more so contemporary culture’s interpretation of what may have occurred to signal what we believe should guide people on their paths forward through difficult and uncertain times.
Truths, Lies, and Fairy Tales brings together four artists whose work often deals with fables, fairy tales, and popular culture mythology in ways that explore many of our wants, desires, fears, and apprehensions. The subjects in these artworks simultaneously provide feelings of attraction and aversion, not unlike the complexities life presents us as we seek a balance of what we hold to be true.
Contemplating the stories behind the stories presented in this exhibition reminds us to reflect on the stories being shared in the news and media today. Whose truths are being shared? Who and what do they represent? Where are the lines that cross over into lies, and why are the lines being drawn where they are? We may not always agree on what is true, but we can always find the source of the truths that are being told.
Matthew McDole was raised on a farm in Bedford, KY, and currently resides in Louisville, KY. He is an illustrator, painter, designer, and skateboarder. His work explores love, mystery, and the macabre.
He mixes tattoo flash-art style with pop culture references, seamlessly blending deadpan humor with a modest amount of melancholy. McDole’s clean, graphic imagery expresses a kind of be-happy, life-is-meaningless attitude. Ultimately, however, McDole is a romantic and this feeling of insignificance is a cause for celebration and reason to enjoy life. He believes people should make the best of their situations in the brief amount of time they have.
The imagery in his work references all manner of symbols from intimate to absurd. His designs reflect personal experiences and interests that highlight joys found in life both large and small. These things are great reminders that things aren’t always so serious, and we don’t always need to sweat the small stuff.
"When my daughter was seven, she played a budding flower in a production of Into the Woods. The folklore of Into the Woods associates the forest as a fertile and wild place where characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Goldilocks face danger. On the other side of danger, these heroines come back learning lessons of responsibility and the need for a more tamed and domesticated life. In her tale, Little Red Riding Hood is reaching the age of womanhood. Her cloak shields her as to say she is not yet available, but its red color suggests awaited menstruation, fertility, and life. From an early age we are taught the expectations and rewards of the nuclear family. At seven, my daughter is already performing as a budding flower, a symbolic gesture of blossoming to come. American culture reiterates these influences within our stories, education, politics, and visual culture."
--Colleen Merrill
Colleen Merrill
"Elsa Hansen Oldham ... creates embroidered tableaus that are simultaneously naïve and knowing, primitive and wittily sophisticated. Much of her work contains groupings of tiny figures — resembling eight-bit Atari characters — that convey something akin to a Freudian six degrees of separation: Shelley Duvall paired with Coco Chanel; a recasting of the Three Stooges starring Larry Flynt, the Velvet Underground’s upright drummer Moe Tucker and Curly Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters...
Image
Hansen Oldham is enigmatic about her creative process and how she chooses her subjects, which are often a mix of pop culture, history and politics seen through a blithely cracked lens. The ideas seem to flow from her unconscious, not from some contrived post-textual analysis. In fact, she is more focused on the actual activity, which calms what she refers to as her natural rambunctiousness."
--Minju Pak for The New York Times Style Magazine, April 4, 2017
Elsa Hansen Oldham
"I am drawn to media like paper, fabric, and wood, which can be easily transformed through alteration. While my work is deeply rooted in drawing, processes like sewing and papercutting allow me to expand my ideas across materials and concepts. I contrast potentially abject imagery with bright saturated colors to allude the fantastical and grotesque while constructing works that border on the illustrative. By cutting, rearranging, and embellishing, I create allusions to both the playful and the perverse.
My past work has focused on folklore, fairy tales, and craft practices as means to explore identity, societal expectations, and violence against women. Meanwhile, my recent work explores the human connection to the natural world as well as to each other, especially within the context the changes to our planet caused by climate change. Still influenced by research and narrative, I explore both pictorial and scientific connections, like symbiotic relationships. As our planet changes, perhaps irrevocably, what connections might we lose? What connections might we gain? Grieving the damage done to the environment and imagining a kind of adaptive symbiosis of my own, my new work is made of candy-colored constructs, inviting viewers to examine our understanding of and connection to a ‘natural’ world."
--Monica Stewart
Monica Stewart
___________________________________________________________
In addition to Truth, Lies, and Fairy Tales, WheelHouse Art will also be opening A Japanese Afternoon is All Quiet on the Western Front by Yoko Molotov, a collection of mixed media works on paper and digital Fine Art NFTs born from the artist's residency at Arts ITOYA in Takeo, Saga, Japan.
