A new group exhibition opens this month at Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG). Fairy Tails will be on view from December 18 to March 27.
Curated by Anne Koval, Fairy Tails explores the wondrous in nature by reconsidering the role of animals in storytelling.
The works in this exhibition 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 innate or unconscious desires.
Fairy tails features the work of participating artists Amalie Atkins, Aganetha Dyck, Meryl McMaster, Sylvia Ptak, Vicky Sabourin, Diana Thorneycroft, Anna Torma, Laura Vickerson, and Janice Wright Cheney.
