Winnipeg Art Gallery's imaginative exhibit explores fairy tales, monsters and genetics

By looking at monsters, we're actually exploring what it means to be human.

—Alison Gillmor, SCENE Reviewer

Wow.  I mean, wow.

Let's just start with one of the poster images for Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, the new exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. 

In a way, The Long Awaited by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini is like one of those "boy and his dog" pictures from the recent Norman Rockwell exhibition, an expression of perfect companionship and uncomplicated affection.

Except here the "pet" is an unexpected hybrid, half manatee and half ... um, elderly great-aunt?  The speculative scenario is made even more unsettling by the fleshy physicality of the piece, which is life-sized and rendered in hyper-realistic detail.  

This travelling exhibition, organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN, is packed with aggressive, extreme, OMG images. But start unpacking the works, and there are loads of subtle ideas.

The 29 contributors - who include art stars like Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith and Winnipeg-born Marcel Dzama -- are examining our relationship to nature, to technology, and to the increasingly complex interactions between the two.

Some of the artists tap into the history of hybrid human-animal connections: medieval bestiaries, fairy tales and nursery rhymes, Romantic evocations of nightmares and Surrealist obsessions with the irrational.

Rapture, an arresting bronze sculpture by Kiki Smith, re-imagines Red Riding Hood. No longer a girlish victim, she is a powerful woman who runs with wolves.

American Cindy Sherman uses images of fairy-tale hags - actually elaborately staged photographic self-portraits - to build up and then break down stereotypes of women and "animal" sexuality.

Some artists reference pop-culture tropes from creature-features, horror flicks and sci-fi. Ashley Bickerton's sinister "snakehead" images suggest a Godzilla-like narrative in which nature revenges itself for the environmental devastation wrought by careless humanity.

Other works make clear that science-fiction is coming closer to science fact. Piccinini, Suzanne Anker, Janaina Tschäpeand Motohiko Odani reference real-life issues like robotics and cyber-reality, extreme plastic surgery, cloning, stem cell research and genetically modified plants and animals. 

The works in Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination can be shocking, disturbing, repulsive, cartoonish or funny. Mostly they are irresistibly fascinating: 

By looking at monsters, we're actually exploring what it means to be human.