MONSTERS at PLAY

Public Premier April 26, 2024. On view through October 31, 2025
A Temporary display within the Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossibilities.

There are 19 bricolage “playthings” within this collection of artworks.

About the Artwork

Every monster, real or imagined, was a child-monster at some point. And, every child had a favorite plaything. These bricolages, whether for cosplay, role modeling, right of passage, or likeness-dolls, represent these Monsters at Play. They helped to appease when lightening flashed and the occasional demon appeared a phantom shadow on the wall.

These were well loved and cherished by their keeper. Sometimes the totems were kept brand new, or perhaps an inappropriate gift that had been brusquely thrown aside, and sometimes destroyed because of too much play. Monsters can be rough on things.

This oeuvre began with the Minotaur’s Plaything encompassed in the MOA 2009 show entitled Archetextural. I became interesting in the mythos character’s back stories + beyond stories from what Homer + other writers had divulged. The video was a natural outgrowth of the process, giving the dear seeker another level of visual information on the playthings. The music accompaniment entitled, For the Damned, is by composer Bonner Kramer (BMI).

We have regaled stories around campfires for eons through Irish fairy tales, mythos, Norse legends, Japanese folktales, H. P. Lovecraft and E. A. Poe’s work. The monsters that inhabit our imaginations are real, some self made, others society made, and perhaps all misunderstood. Some of these are benevolent characters, some torture others + others are self-tortured. These forms and silhouettes of quintessential babies’ needs and playthings compliment the monsters. Tangentizing these playthings is a way of making monsters exist in this world. And, as a last thought, Monsters are only thus if you let them be.

In addition to these exhibited playthings, there is a collection of 6 paintings on loose canvas pulled from from a larger oeuvre of an ongoing investigation of Damnatio Memoriae. The idea of obscuring memories by transferring, replacing, or erasing a memory completely. Each painting is a shard, a splintered quintessential story of that character.

Having broken into a defunct asylum in the northeast years ago, what I experienced there has remained with me. The theme of fictitious lives cycles in my work. What struck me the most, outside of the inmate’s letters and artwork that were strewn throughout ghostly rooms, were the telescoped life stories reported by the psychoanalysts and interns. After each patient’s death, their life was duly summed up in a few abbreviated lines typed on the bottom of each yellowed page. This is all that remained of each life. An epitaph of sorts. A cc left to decay inside a shoebox in the records room, awaiting the bulldozer, and final burial.

The door is open between a fun house and the insane asylum, and the human condition runs maniacally and deep through the halls.

Who are your people?

Artist Biography
Jayne A. Harnett-Hargrove is a cross trained in the traditional arts whose output encompasses illustration, bricolage, word-wrangling, Meraki zines, costume design for opera, immersive, and other theatrics. She gleans narrative shards through exploring memory, history, and personal myth — threading symbolism and pushing the oft non-sequitur into meaning — where images expand and enlighten our human condition.

Jayne is a recipient of Colorado Council of the Arts grant, and past resident artist at Ad Hoc in Denver, CO. She is cross-trained out in the world, educated at Parsons /NYC and California College of Arts in fine & theater arts, costume to couture, commercial, and interpretive installation. In the past she has guided ArtMix; day trips into the expressive arts to carry into the practice of life. Jayne has word-wrangled, painted, and taught on four continents – lending her hands for mentoring, exhibiting art along the way, while emulating her heroes, Bouboulina, Hundertwasser and Joan DeArc. Jayne has lived in the shadows of the Rockies, in Joshua Tree desert, and on the Libyan shore of Crete — and continues a globe trotting tradition, for work and other pleasures, as an important part of her inspiration and musing. She currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville NC, but her heart and mind always seem to be miles away.

Learn more at harnetthargrove.com 

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