Might of Mythology

All of our dreams, hopes, and fears are encapsulated in the narratives we create. Our myths tell of the magnificent creatures that persist through the collective imagination of our kind. Through illustrating the universal nature of human emotions, myths have the ability to unite us in exploring the innate psychological motivations that we all share as a single species.

I remove myths from their cultural contexts, stylistically uniting them through similar form, line, material, and composition. The figures are illustrated on thin paper with black ink, held upright in space by steel armature. They cast their shadows on the surrounding surfaces, leaving the viewer with a sense of a fantastic realness in their presence. By removing the identifying cultural cues found in these legends, characters like Quetzalcoatl and Zmey Gorynych can be placed within the same cultural realms as each other, even though their origins are disparate in time and space. In doing this, the myths are able to represent the larger culture of humanity and the underlying psychology behind the myths we create.

Each figure presented in the space represents a different mythological figure, presenting the diversity and ingenuity of human imagination through overwhelming numbers. These figures smile at the viewer, welcoming the audience into their worlds, while interacting in the three-dimensional space. Ghostly figures made of plastic project only their lineworks onto other figures, creating an eerie sense of phantasmal representation, while other, more solid figures create a sense of familiarity and diversity.

By juxtaposing varying creatures, their similarities become accentuated, discarding the differences in favor of our sameness. It is in these similar narratives that humanity becomes unified through our very nature.