Mythopoeia

Masaki Isikawa
Hina Maekawa
Martha Panagiotopoulou
Jina Song
Orestis Stavrou

10-11 December 2019
The Old Hairdresser’s 
Glasgow, UK 


mythopoeia
noun

> the making of myth or myths
> a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional or artificial mythology is created by the writer

from Greek muthopoiia, from muthos ‘myth’ + poiein ‘make’

For two thousand years, classical myth has offered up its gods and mortals, epiphanies, curses, and cautionary tales to artists eager to provide them with visual form. Even now, myths have a way of prophesying the human condition, suggesting that the world and the bodies we inhabit are and always will be sites of moral contention.

With our most paralyzing curiosities addressed by science, and amidst a recent fixation on fact, allegories continue to hold a particular relevance. So powerful is our attraction to hyperbolic versions of history that we insist on fabricating alternate ones, whose ancestries, geographies and conflicts are wholly fictional. In this sense, myth is less a subject matter than a free-form approach to the making of knowledge. 

For the five artists featured, an understanding of myth as method raises questions about the efficacy and outcomes of ‘mythopoeia.’ A myth takes on different meanings at different points in time, extending to individual, political and spiritual realms. Here, these range from stories of personal origin and representations of the self and the other to confrontations with the natural world and its imagined loopholes. If mythology harbours mankind’s innermost queries, perhaps this method can see them at last set free. 


List of Works:

Masaki Isikawa, The Person Who Wants to Reach the End of the Universe, 2019. Scaffolding tubes, light bulb, floodlight, negative film, wood panel, magnifier.

Martha Panagiotopoulou, Moonseeds, 2019. Steel, plaster, soil, glass balls, clay, swan feathers. 

Jina Song, Chapter 86, Letter #17, 2019. Digital video, 3.12min. (collaboration with Giacinta Frisillo)  
                                                                                                 
Hina Maekawa, The Devilish Twist (Series), 2019.
  1. Hokkaido #1, oil and pigment on canvas
  2. Oni #1, oil and pigment on canvas
  3. Oni #2, oil and pigment on canvas
  4. The Hairy Caterpillar #1, wig, feather, yarn, fabric, aluminum wire.

Orestis Stavrou, Porfires (Series), 2019.
  1. Soldier No. 5, digital painting
  2. Weeds and Trees, oil on canvas
  3. Untitled, digital painting


Artists:

MASAKI ISKIKAWA (b. 1995, Japan) sees everyday materials as having potential beyond their intended uses. His installation serves as a kind of blueprint for the edge of the world, where industrial appliances and trivial objects form a record of time-less existence.

HINA MAEKAWA (b. 1990, Japan) explores her two-fold connection to the Ainu people of Hokkaido and their coded presence in ancient Japanese art. Her work incorporates polytheism and the supernatural to find beauty and solace in the condition of the outsider.

MARTHA PANAGIOTOPOULOU (b. 1991, Greece) is concerned with the divisions between man and nature and their effect on the human psyche. Using Greek mythology as a starting point, she creates sculptural meditations on birth and fertility, metamorphosis and the cyclical evolution of time.

JINA SONG (b. 1993, South Korea) uses performance and digital media to build an open-ended, fictional narrative around inter-Korean issues. In the work Chapter 86, Letter #17, the character Cynthia reads a series of letters that complicate her understanding of her husband’s past.

ORESTIS STAVROU (b. 1990, Cyprus) combines paintings, drawings, and writings in the series Porfires. Drawing on the Biblical ‘land of purple,’ the series is a reference to Tyrian purple dye made from the secretions of Murex predatory snails.


[additional images availale upon request]