Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Lassoing whimsy and venturing into uncanny realms where crimson eyes peer from stones, “Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker” at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, curated by Valerie Hegarty, presents a captivating visual language of non-human elementals and imaginings. Fairies, as an archetype, are perennially underestimated. Nimble and powerful in their capacity to provoke enchantment, they idiosyncratically neutralize assumptions through glamour, illusion, and surprise, and collapse boundaries of knowing and unknowing, and visibility and invisibility. In this group show, various paintings portray animals – one has bats emerging from petrified stage curtains in the forest – but figuration dominates. Bodies on the ground or bending towards the earth suggest unknown struggles, pixie-led crossings, enchanted tasks, and tales of wonder. Hybrid creatures, including Mala Iqbal’s painting Forest Tangle with Jaybird, align with Leonora Carrington’s surreal chimerical figures, including Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II and Girl, Horse, Tree, now on view in “Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver” at the Rose Art Museum.
In sculptures, paintings, ceramics, and mixed media, 29 artists shine a light on fairyland oddities. Various fantasist themes emerge that chime with the present-day challenges and responses – coping with impossibilities, surviving perils, subverting intolerable conditions, embracing wonder in dark days. Angela Fraleigh’s rococo-style painting, poetically titled Through the half-drowned stars, depicts a troupe of nymphs, naiads, or nixies aloofly lounging in a watery fairy haunt. Glimpses of their faces can be seen, and limbs are eclipsed by leaves and marshy vegetation, dotted by plant cells or will-of-the-wisps. In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson reflects on distortion and “problems of vision” in fantastic art:
An emphasis upon invisibility points to one of the central thematic concerns of the fantastic: problems of vision… Knowledge, comprehension, reason, are established through the power of the look, through the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ of the human subject whose relation to objects is structured through his field of vision. In fantastic art, objects are not readily appropriated through the look: things slide away from the powerful eye/I which seeks to possess them, thus becoming distorted, disintegrated, partial and lapsing into invisibility.
Overall, in “Fairlyland 2,” many works hint at unseen, ominous transactions. In Ornella Pocetti’s Quizás sea lo único que te salve esta noche, the title – in English, “Maybe it’s the only thing that saves you tonight” – hints that the stakes may be high. Marta Thoma Hall’s Visitation depicts a pair of legs leaping stag-like below half-evaporated moth wings, as diaphanous brushstrokes hover, drip, and swirl from above. Alex Jovanovich’s drawing Mother Spider stands out as a mysterious depiction of a ritual, featuring symmetrical patterns of membranous bits and pieces of nature. One central decaying, thorax-like maple leaf is surrounded by worms, snakes, and lines, suggestive of flow, fragmentation, collapse, and renewal.
The exhibition also offers porcelain and clay sculptures, capturing both the stillness of orchids, as in Jessica Stoller’s elegant Untitled (pull), and the pulsing movements and transformative understories of the forest and natural world. Streaming mythological ideation, the sculptures reveal serpents hoisted by a fairy queen on her throne (Lindsay Montgomery’s Queen Mab), snails morphing into a human hand (Jonathan Ehrenberg’s Snail II), and all-seeing peridot eyeballs looming above a prophetic mother-of-pearl mouth (Elissa Bromberg’s The Queen). Swans in Delphite, Amber Cowan’s monochrome antique glass presents two miniature swans nestled into ferns, fronds, and plant life. These highly crafted creatures seem trapped in the dainty apparatus of their display.
In The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, Katharine Briggs notes that perhaps “the fairies are said to be the ghosts of the old druids” supervising “the growth of seed.” Briggs reckons some fairies were thought of as “dwindled gods or nature spirits” associated with “the half-deified spirits of the dead and the spirits of woods and wells and vegetations.” Such images of fairies surface in Anya Kielar’s painting Witchress, Rebecca Morgan’s sculpture Muted Sunset Fade, and Marcelo Canevari’s painting The Call of the Night (El llamado de la noche). Canevari’s beautifully rendered painting depicts siren-like moonlit bird creatures, possibly beckoning a mortal to the shore. It remains to be seen whether the pixie-led journey is beginning, ending, or somewherein between.
“Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker,” Mindy Solomon Gallery, 848 NW 22 Street, Miami, FL. Curated by Valerie Hegarty. Through February 15, 2025.
About the author: Kari Adelaide Razdow curates independently at The Sphinx, an itinerant curatorial project. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Eyes Towards the Dove, Boston Art Review, Hyperallergic, NYLON, the Walker Art Center Blog, and elsewhere, as well as Two Coats of Paint. She is author of Enchanted Pedagogies: Archetypes, Magic, and Knowledge.
