THE CHRONICLES OF YARNIA

Within the colorful, maniacal aesthetic of artist Hannah Epstein resides a conscious blurring of the lines between formal sophistication and pure ridiculousness — an artistic practice of subverted norms and deconstructed traditions. With an unapologetic embrace of the domestic tradition of textiles, Epstein speaks in a language composed of trashy cartoons and folksy narratives — humorous, absurd, and sometimes disconcerting, her work transfigures universal meaning from an endless sea of post-internet digital culture, producing an oddly original modern-day folklore.

Along with poking fun at the notion of traditional craft, the 28 works in The Chronicles of Yarnia — aptly named in jest of and in reverence to C. S. Lewis’ biblical allegory — mirror contemporary culture with the artist’s own particular brand of storytelling. Epstein sees her low brow technique of hooking shag as the perfect vehicle to toil in the recycled memes of digital media, mining the vernacular of online comics, pop up ads and internet memes that fuel the collective consciousness, and reinterpreting it as contemporary folklore. “This relates to the folkloric lens I adopted in my early studies where I learned to interpret popular culture as containing archetypical structures underneath the ever changing masks of individual names and faces,” Epstein explains. 

In C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia he extends the invitation, “do not dare not to dare”, and clearly Epstein has taken this advice to heart. Her work is bold and brave, not just in its execution, but in its vulnerable self-introspection and reflexive examination of the best and worst of contemporary culture. In Hannah’s words: “The pieces in this show are an outpouring of an imaginative realm into ‘reality’. They build, one at a time, into a world, which is both a reflection of the one I inhabit and the one that co-exists in the mind.”