Month: April 2021

The Color of Myth in the Tangled Age is a show that explores varying interpretations of myth in art, as well as their  necessity and inevitability.. Each artist in the show deals with myth in personal ways, celebrating the existence of myth (or: Each artist in the exhibition grapples with, explores, or celebrates different aspects of myths in intimate and unexpected ways(Here I would explain how you define myth and why you are arguing these artists work all engage in mythmaking or mythbusting… The range of approaches the artists take is wide ranging. Some work with abstraction, while others make works that are  abstract. The show will also be incorporating works that represent myth in more abstract ways. Some works will be making use of extreme color or images in order to best represent the qualities of myth as vehicles that showcase both the hyper realistic and surreal. This inherent quality of myth is what makes them both inevitable and intensely confrontational. The Color of Myth in the Tangled Age is a show which incorporates mixed media, primarily video and performance, and is meant to be seen in a venue that straddles the manmade and the natural.

Tianzhou Chen’s Adaha II is a performance that challenges the viewer through its presentation of  myths of sexuality and extreme freedom for the contemporary digital age. creating a myth for the contemporary age dealing with sexuality and extreme freedom. Although the work is performed on a stage, it is still confrontationalvery much in the viewer’s face, with its heavy use of color, light, and bizarre imagery. Sky Hopinka’s film, maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore on the other hand, is a much more subdued work, . The work It is a film that is around 80 minutes long, that incorporates both Native American myth and modern American myths culture, and proposes  that offers a melding of the two. His work also makes heavy use of nature in order to show the mythical qualities of the natural world, explaining one possible way that any and all myth could come about in the first place (again here explain what you mean by myth). Takeshi Murata’s Untitled (Pink Dot) showcases the wayshow modern media can easily become legendary. In this short, five minute film, Murata meshes scenes from Rambo with a constant blinking pink dot. The colors of melting images turn the movie into an otherworldly affair that both compliments the other works in the exhibit and creates a myth of the digitized world. Finally, Nalini Malani’s You Don’t Hear Me reveals  how myth can become personal. This work pulls from many cultures: being reminiscent of East Asian screen paintings and incorporating characters that seem Western and Eastern. It also is being informed by Malani’s upbringing as affected by the partition of India and her experiences of the fear and uncertainty of the time. Her work uses myth to examine violence and womanhood, among other topics, and shows the relevance of ancient stories.

Myths have been around since humans learned to communicate, and while it may seem the increasing secularization of the world has made myth irrelevant, the works in this show shows their everlasting endurance and importance. People need to see the world through a more perfect and simple lens, and that’s all myths are: representations of the world in a form that is easy to grasp and learn from. Today, myths serve this purpose through forms like movies, TV, rumours, and social media. They keep us connected to the world around us and the people we encounter, they are universal enough for everyone to understand, while specific enough to touch each person individually. The Color of Myth in the Tangled Age will pull back the curtain on many ways myth makes us who we are.