Mist Wreathed

SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Room 2245
3/06 to 3/12 2018

Vanessa Albury
Jesse Bransford
Elizabeth Insogna
Juliet Jacobson
Alessandro Keegan
Lauren Luloff
Jeremy Olson
Catalina Ouyang
Max Razdow
Laurel Sparks
Emerald Rose Whipple
Brian Wood

Strange and wild, the fantastic is a deliberately unstable category that displaces, invites, and provokes interpretation. Whether this realm involves entering a magic mirror, stepping into a portal, or walking through a wall of mist, there is never a straight aim, but we are propelled to enter, even if we leave deeply altered and mist wreathed. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, she notes that traversing the fantastic is not a light-footed journey:

What is fantasy?…as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality…It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. (145)

In order to extend beyond, and return back again with neither rule nor set rhythm, an acute and instinctual awareness of limits is needed to endure these radical ontological shifts. Subjects who look through the ether of mist may list helplessly at the edge of unspeakable beauty and horror, recoiling, fleeing and losing their foothold after returning to so-called reality.

Grappling with intangible memories of things glimpsed beyond gates seems to be a typical modernist posture. The sublime — whether in terms of the Romantic ideal, high modernism or pulp versions ambulating around these fields – perhaps presents its interior as impenetrable mist. To become engaged with the transcendent plane is to leave “mist wreathed,” and the tales left by narrators are often unspeakable or impossibly arcane.

Contemporary artists who walk the fields of the fantastic often do so with a resolve to live and speak clearly of these spaces. By investing themselves in processes of poesis, esoteric research, and literary authoring rich with associations to ancient lexical paths, they have a longing to remember.

Le Guin, Ursula. “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed.
David Sandner. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2004.