December 10, 2016 through January 14, 2017
Opening Reception, Saturday, December 10, 7-10PM
We’ve known it from childhood as a fairy tale with a happy ending, but scholars say that the Hansel and Gretel story is really rooted in the tragic European past of over 700 years ago, in a scary time when famine was so rampant that parents some ate their own children. It also may even be a folkloric fossil of some millennia-old coming-of-age story at the root of human language.
But even to modern readers, Hansel and Gretel evokes the dread of parental rejection and abandonment – with the underlying horrific possibility that your mother and father are not only eager to put you in harm’s way, but really want you dead.
Los Angeles-based artist and performer Gordon Henderson brings his own macabre methodology to this eldritch narrative of innocence abandoned to devouring menace with his own Hansel and Gretel exhibition on view through January 14, 2017 at Bermudez Projects.
The exhibition is a highly personal reinterpretation of the classic Grimm Brothers tale and will include 22 ink and graphite illustrations in Henderson’s sly, spare, suggestive style.
According to Henderson, “The story is rich with symbolism and open to many interpretations. To me Hansel and Gretel
His illos lift Hansel and Gretel (they’d be Johnnie and Maggie to us moderns) right out the depths of the Black Forest of 19th century fable into the pink modernity of a mysterious, low-life now. Henderson’s idea of a witch’s cottage is a massive, rose-colored mobile home, complete with satellite disk and fronted by plastic flamingos and candy-cane and lollipop trees. The lost brother and sister approaching it are not tiny rustics, but a pair of diminutive, black-clad urbanites, wary of the delicious temptations before them, but somehow also still irresistibly drawn to them.
On their path along the way, they’ve been watched over, not by gentle bird life but by ominous owls and a looming, detached, yellow human heart. When the pair lie down to sleep, they are guarded by a flock of bats.
Later, we see the two seated alone at a generously-laid tea table, served by a Hendersonian figure that seems to be half Boston terrier, half kangaroo. Later Hansel and Gretel, still holding hands, encounter a group of men smoking whose exhaled fumes overhead form themselves mystically into inverted birds and humans. As if to tell us that there is a sinister bond between human and natural creatures, and that this connection can be gravely dangerous.
Gordon Henderson (b. 1963) has been an active participant in the DIY movement since the 1980s. Under the alias, Nib Geebles, he has published books, cards and the extremely popular Nib Geebles Calendar. His artworks have been exhibited in galleries throughout Los Angeles and San Francisco, including Gallery 825, Space and Bucheon, and are in held public and private collections. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
