The short version:
Cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel is the author of a textbook, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, about making comics, written in collaboration with her husband, the cartoonist Matt Madden; and the graphic novel La Perdida(Pantheon Books). She’s also the co-writer of the graphic novel Life Sucks. Previously, she published Soundtrackand Mirror, Window(Fantagraphics Books), two collections that gather stories and drawings from her comic book Artbabe, which she published between 1992 and 1999. She collaborated with Ira Glass on “Radio: An Illustrated Guide”, a non-fiction comic about how the radio show This American Life is made. Abel won both the Harvey and Lulu awards for “Best New Talent” in 1997; La Perdida won the 2002 “Best New Series” Harvey Award. She teaches at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and Madden and Abel are also series editors for The Best American Comics. They live in Brooklyn with their daughter.

Fairy tales are always being co-opted. The famous brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm who, in my day, were often mistaken to the originators of all fairy tales (whereas now Nickelodeon is more likely to be the mistaken originator), simply collected and interpreted stories they gathered in Germany for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). The collection was seminal only in its scholarly application. The Brothers Grimm, linguists and philosophers—and only accidentally folklorists—were subject to plenty of criticism during their time and were frequently accused of misrepresenting or altering tales that had been handed down through oral tradition within the loose conglomeration of villages and tribal alliances that eventually became Germany.

A quick glance at the Grimms’ versions of “Cinderella” (“Aschenputtel”) or “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Rotkäppchen”) reveal much darker and more morally ambiguous tales than those eventually popularized in American culture. Even as Disney has continued to push sanitized polarities of right and wrong onto generations of mesmerized youth—who, at this point, are practically connected to their DVD players by an IV drip—writers, librettists, filmmakers and artists have been reinterpreting, co-opting and dissecting fairy tales with regularity. At times, it almost feels like a standard trick for confronting the blank page: When lacking an idea of one’s own, there’s always popular folk fodder to rehash. But just because the fairy tale is an easy target, doesn’t mean an exhibition such as the current Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: Fairy Tales Retold can’t be intelligent and capable of inducing, in the jaded adult mind, the familiar glee of encountering the same icons in childhood.

On view at Eight Modern, the exhibition sucks several artists into its orbit (perhaps a few more than a focused display demands), and indulges the practice over a span of decades. One wall is dedicated to David Hockney’s “Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm,” a suite of aquatint etchings from 1969 that remains fresh, elegant and kinkily alluring. His flat, graphic approach, dry humor and dark sensibilities do well at plumbing the original complexity of the tales recorded by the Grimms, as opposed to the more popular and dumbed-down versions.

Distributed around the gallery are various works by Kiki Smith that investigate folk archetypes, quaint legends and crone lore to mixed degrees of success. Works by Richard Tuttle and Jim Dine are elegant in and of themselves, but don’t push far enough into the territory to reveal any intriguing geography among such universal signifiers as such tales invoke. Pieces by Elizabeth Layton—a depiction of the elderly Cinderella whose fairy tale has turned to bitter reality—and Paula Rego—a haunting etching dubbed “Goosey Goosey Gander”—are successful and appropriate, but maddening for the lack of further work. Rego’s nursery rhyme print is worth a visit, but it’s a shame—given the theme—that one of her more broadly probing and more precisely implicating illustrations of Snow White, Peter Pan or Pinocchio couldn’t be located. Jessica Abel, creator of the ArtBabe comic, and a contemporary urban folk tale creator in her own right, is a welcome addition, although she could have been more celebrated in the presentation.

New York artist Adela Liebowitz puts a good foot forward, especially in, “The Awakening,” a large oil and linen work, in which three brutally creepy young girls conduct a mysterious congress in a sparse, blue-tinged woodland. The show’s real strength, however, is sourced from imminently capable photogravures of David Levinthal and the illustrative, fierce genius of Peregrine Honig and Fay Ku.

Levinthal’s images, which use kitschy pot-metal figurines to enact narrative moments, form Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, maraud the gristle of the spine with the nauseating tingle of genetic and cultural memory instilled by the oft-hidden violence and perversity of our country’s past. The series, from which only one piece is hanging—the remainder needs to be viewed with assistance from the gallery staff—is remarkably printed by Landfall Press.

Executed with similar skill by the Lawrence Lithography Workshop, is Honig’s series of prints, “Father Gander.” Honig, whose alarming illustrations vacillate from sly to violent, plundered early children’s book techniques, 1950s homemaker graphic sensibilities and Barbarella-style babedom to sexualize, dramatize and traumatize Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. Each are put into positions of uncomfortable addiction, self-destructive flooziness, unflattering psychological reflection, etc., until their magic auras become as cheap and tainted as the darkest secrets and despairs that each viewer drags into the gallery of his/her own accord. Honig’s aesthetic is so keen, her hand so precise and her symbolic cuing so adept, that her unerring dismemberment of contemporary culture through fairy tales is a fire in the brain and a sucker punch in the gut all in one moment of pained bliss.

Using a similar rope-a-dope technique of finding pleasure in discomfort, Fay Ku (who has been offered a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in the upcoming cycle) employs a recurring cast of young girls, sexless but sexualized, who experience mythic and legendary circumstances in animated states of violence, vengeance, curiosity or hyper-ennui. Working in ink, watercolor and graphite, Ku leaves big sheets of paper mostly barren, thereby instilling sudden and ferocious energy into her combative and difficult scenes. In “Furies,” the young denizens of her world, in playhouse-appropriate martial garb, attack and dismember a scatter of harpies. In “Top Girl,” they turn upon each other in an acrobatic and archery-filled game of king of the hill.

Once There Was, as an exhibition, breaks apart the comforting epilogue of a happily ever after, not only on paper or in fable, not only in the modern world at large, but very likely right outside the window right now and within the core of our individual, meandering, complicated lives.

September 14 – October 7
Reception: Friday, September 14, 2007, 5:30 – 7:30pm

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: Fairy Tales Retold. This group exhibition features works of art inspired by folk tales, fairy stories, and mythic archetypes.

With works by a number of artists, including Jessica Abel, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Peregrine Honig, Fay Ku, Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton, Adela Leibowitz, David Levinthal, Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, and Richard Tuttle, this exhibition illuminates and challenges traditional interpretations of fairy tales. Stories heard in childhood exert a powerful pull on the artists participating in Once There Was, who take on the powerful role of storyteller and the task of mythopoesis, of creating and renewing meaning. Their modern reworkings of old tales draw upon familiar narratives for their cultural resonance and iconography.

The lithograph “The Frog Prince” is based on an episode from Artbabe, comic book artist and writer Jessica Abel’s critically acclaimed, clear-eyed series about young bohemians in Chicago. Her ear for dialogue and eye for the nuances of non-verbal communication stand out.

Jim Dine was instrumental in helping Pop Art gain critical acceptance and widespread popularity in the 1960s. He has long been fascinated by the story of Pinocchio, especially by the puppet’s genesis and Geppetto’s ability to bring an inanimate object to life. To Dine, Pinocchio is much greater than the sum of his ill-shapen parts.

David Hockney’s etchings from Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1969) play upon the simple, direct language and the fantastical, often absurd nature of the six fairy tales. The influential British artist goes beyond literal illustration to construct memorable images of wit, imagination, and dramatic graphic style.

Once There Was will also include Father Gander, a portfolio of six lithographs from Kansas City artist Peregrine Honig. The prints pair subversively distorted fairy tale settings and characters with cheerfully mocking captions and titles. Provocative, sexually-charged depictions of Cinderella, Snow White and others are drawn with a palette inspired by the illustrations in classic children’s’ books.

The large-scale drawings of Fay Ku, are characterized by amazing draftsmanship, detail, and the judicious use of pattern. The Taiwanese-American artist creates a private folklore informed by a wide range of influences from classical Asian art to world mythology, current events, psychology, personal experience, and pure imagination. Her view of childhood is unromantic but astonishingly vital one, in which halfway-feral children act out fantastic allegories of socialization.

The late Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton brought a delightful exuberance and fluidity to her whimsical and exaggerated self-portraits. Such is the case in her print “Cinderella,” in which an aged Cinderella sits with sagging skin and well-worn feet, while her prince (whose crown is modeled on the Kansas City Royals’ logo) watches a baseball game through a castle window.

The paintings of Adela Leibowitz are portraits of young girls in dreamlike tableaus, finely-rendered in an eerie blue palette. The girls, isolated and oddly impassive, appear in ominous landscapes inspired the Brothers Grimm, Northern European painters, and classic horror films. Feelings of anxiety and suspense are made palpable through the artist’s juxtaposition of youthful curiosity and the threatening unseen.

David Levinthal’s suite of eight photogravures illustrates scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His arrangements of tin figurines, eerily silhouetted against the blackness of a void, powerfully evoke both cultural myths and historical fact.

The Nursery Rhyme etchings of Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego confirmed her as one of the foremost graphic artists of her generation. Darkly comic and psychologically charged, works such as Goosey Goosey Gander also reveal her prodigious talent as a storyteller.

The work of sculptor and printmaker Kiki Smith stand out, proffering a raw and intensely personal empathy with the heroines of cautionary tales like Little Red Riding Hood. Her works are elegiac in tone and explore childhood disenchantments, loss of innocence, adolescent awakening, attraction and vulnerability.

Known as an artist’s artist, Richard Tuttle resists easy categorization. Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle is sprightly yet enigmatic – the association between the abstract composition and the line from the familiar nursery rhyme at the center of the lithograph is inexplicable but also somehow appropriate.

Once There Was explores the power and possibility to be found in the uncanny, earthy, violent, beautiful and altogether magical world of fairy tales.

Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: Fairy Tales Retold will run from Friday, September 14, through Sunday, October 7. Eight Modern is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30am to 5:30pm, and 11am to 4pm on Sundays, at 231 Delgado Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501. For further information and image requests, contact Jaquelin Loyd or Margo Thoma via email at info@eightmodern.net or by phone at (505) 995-0231.