Into the woods: Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira was commissioned to create this installation for QAGOMA’s show.Credit: C Callistemon © QAGOMA
Amanda Slack-Smith is wearing a Red Riding Hood earring in her left ear and a wolf earring in the other.
She is standing beneath a tangle of huge, gnarly tree branches that appear to have burst out of the walls of Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art – a spectacular and sinister welcome for visitors to the Fairy Tales exhibition, which Slack-Smith has masterminded and curated.
“I’m fascinated by the fact that we still want to tell these tales,” she says. “Because fairy tales used to be the way, through metaphor, you could talk about taboo things – like abandonment, and assault, or domestic violence.”
“I don’t think there was anybody we approached that wasn’t super keen to be involved,” says curator Amanda Slack-Smith.Credit: Nick Dent
Slack-Smith, who gives off good-witch vibes rather than wicked-stepmother ones, is the curatorial manager of the Cinematheque at QAGOMA. The Fairy Tales project has been on her mind for 10 years, ever since she programmed a series of fairytale films at GOMA that broke attendance records.
“It opened up a whole world of narratives that I hadn’t really thought about since childhood,” she says. “I kept deep-diving and realised, ‘oh, there’s artists working in this [genre]’, and so it’s built from there.”
Fairy Tales has artworks spanning from the mid-19th century to now, as well as an impressive selection of movie costumes and props, plus a Cinematheque program of relevant films.
Well-known Australian artists like Patricia Piccinini, Abdul Abdullah, Tracey Moffatt and Charles Blackman feature alongside European masters like Henri Matisse and Gustave Dore.
There’s even a series of fragile 1850s “paper cuts” made by Hans Christian Andersen as a party trick that the famous fairytale writer would give away to dinner guests.
Eiko Ishioka’s stunning costumes from the 2012 Snow White film Mirror Mirror are included in the Fairy Tales exhibition at GOMA.Credit: Jan Thijs
Those extraordinary branches that visitors must pass beneath were commissioned especially for the show from Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira. Assembled by stapling together layers of plywood, Corupira took Oliveira and his assistants 16 days to build, and will be dismantled when the show closes.
“I think there’s a lovely callback to oral tales in Henrique’s work, the ephemerality of it,” Slack-Smith says.
A pair of concave mirrors by Anish Kapoor evoke Snow White.Credit: C Callistemon © QAGOMA
The darkened room that lies beyond may have visitors feeling like they’ve stumbled upon a giant’s hoard, or an Aladdin’s cave.
Dore’s 1862 painting of Red Riding Hood startled by the wolf in her grandma’s bed is hung nearby a 2002 reinvention – American artist Kiki Smith’s painting of both Red and Grandma emerging, bloody and undaunted, from the wolf’s belly.
Snow White is evoked in a pair of concave mirrors by Anish Kapoor and a glass coffin by Jana Sterbak that disturbingly contains another, smaller glass coffin.
Season of the witch: Trulee Hall’s Witch House (Seance of the Umbilical Coven), 2020, has been recreated at GOMA.Credit: Joshua White / JWPictures.com
There are echoes of Hansel and Gretel in Trulee Hall’s recreation of her 2020 installation Witch House (Seance of the Umbilical Coven). A wooden shack overgrown with tree roots that’s both Stygian and strangely alluring, it invites viewers to come inside and watch a mysterious video. Some might not be inclined to accept.
Not everything is so macabre, however. While the first part of the show, ‘Into the Woods’, explores notions of the repressed or the forbidden, the second, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, looks at the tradition of parallel worlds that emerged as fairy tales became part of children’s literature in the 19th century.
The spirit of Lewis Carroll inhabits oversized flowers by Yayoi Kusama, flying mushrooms by Carsten Holler and ‘Alice’ photographs by Polixeni Papapetrou. There are lithographs from Maurice Sendak’s beloved 1963 children’s book Where The Wild Things Are, and shaggy costumes from the 2008 Spike Jonze movie.
Indeed, for any film fan, the costumes here will be a major drawcard. Either David Bowie’s Goblin King outfit from Labyrinth or the Swarovski glass slipper from Disney’s 2015 Cinderella might well be worth the price of admission alone.
David Bowie’s Goblin King outfit from Labyrinth or the Swarovski glass slipper from Disney’s 2015 Cinderella might well be worth the price of admission alone.
An original Marcel Escoffier dress from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 La Belle et la Bete is a huge get, as are the Mad Hatter (worn by Johnny Depp) and Red Queen (worn by Helena Bonham Carter), designed by Colleen Atwood for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
Then there are the eight costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka for the 2012 Snow White retelling Mirror Mirror – incredibly lavish and outrageous gowns worn by Julia Roberts’ wicked queen, and a ‘Swan’ masquerade dress worn by star Lily Collins.
Sugar was used in the construction of Timothy Horn’s Mother-Load, 2008.Credit: Timothy Horn
Melbourne-born Timothy Horn has lived in the US for the past 22 years making artworks that are queer takes on fairy-tale tropes. One of his pieces in Fairy Tales, Mother-load (2008), a Baroque-style sedan chair that looks like Cinderella’s carriage, is entirely encrusted in crystallised sugar (a reference to the carriage owned by US art patron Alma Spreckels, who was married to sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels).
The tale behind it involves Horn visiting a grocery store in Albuquerque and emptying their shelves of rock sugar.
“I filled up a couple of shopping carts and got to the checkout. The woman said, ‘doing some baking?’
“I carted it all back to my studio and two weeks later I had to go back and get more.”
Horn is chuffed to be exhibiting next to a Matisse – namely a costume designed for a 1920s Ballets Russes production of The Song of the Nightingale.
A still from Fuyuhiko Takata’s Dream Catcher.Credit: Courtesy: The artist and WAITINGROOM, Tokyo
Another nightingale, from Oscar Wilde’s story The Nightingale and the Rose, is the subject of the short film by double-Archibald winning artist Del Kathryn Barton (directed by Brendan Fletcher) that screens on a loop in the same room.
“I feel like this show is a perfect, glorious fit for me,” says Barton. “So much so that I’m actually currently working on a feature film that is literally called Fairy.”
This show is a perfect, glorious fit for me.
Del Kathryn Barton
Post-colonial approaches to European fairy tales figure in Destiny Deacon’s photographs portraying Wizard of Oz characters made from vintage ‘Aboriginal’ dolls and in Moffatt’s Invocations screenprints locating a brown-skinned girl in a Disney-like magical forest.
The House of Mouse may have a monopoly on screen fairy tales, but that’s not reflected in the film program co-curated by Sophie Hopmeier.
We do get Cinderella (2015) and Beauty and the Beast (2017), and the expected classics like The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride, but there are also world-cinema fantasies such as Kurosawa’s Dreams, plus movies with a fairy-tale subtext such as Walkabout, Wild at Heart and The Night of the Hunter.
What big eyes you have: Bizarre 1984 film The Company of Wolves is part of the Fairy Tale Cinema program.Credit: Image courtesy: Park Circus/ITV Studios
Running through the summer until April 28, Fairy Tales occupies a Goldilocks zone for GOMA: sophisticated enough for art aficionados, accessible enough for casual visitors, and with tonnes of appeal for kids.
“When the show was first presented to us three years ago we were in from the get-go,” says GOMA director Chris Saines.
“We knew the show felt like us, like something quite distinct and unique to what QAGOMA does. And I think Amanda’s really brought that home in a wonderful way.”
Slack-Smith says that artists and film studios were uniformly supportive of the project. “I don’t think there was anybody we approached that wasn’t super keen to be involved,” she says.
A still from Del Kathryn Barton’s 14-minute animation adapting Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose. Credit: Courtesy: The artist and RoslynOxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Del Kathryn Barton agrees entirely.
“This show has totally blown my mind,” she says.
“I know most people would say this, but Where The Wild Things Are was by far my most favourite story as a little person. This idea of being in trouble and escaping into an imaginary world – I totally lived in a world of the imagination.
“And for me, my imaginings of the ‘wild rumpus’ were just the most glorious thing ever.”
Fairy Tales runs at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until April 28, 2024. Tickets are $28 for adults, $10 for children and free for under four years.
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