HERE BE SMALL MONSTERS

This is a show about the monsters under the childhood bed. Not the big, epic ones but the small, personal ones. The ones that live in the gap between a fairy tale and a memory, in the quiet of a forest at dusk, in the shape of a body that doesn’t fit. The artists here are cartographers of this unsettled territory. They use familiar maps: Dorothy’s fallen house and ruby slippers (Skromnaya), gothic arches, guardian owls (Volkov), lovers’ locks (Gudwin) only to arrive somewhere far stranger. Safety is conditional. Nostalgia has teeth. A home is a frame for a fragile scene. A slipper is a tiny tomb, and a parent’s love can wear a skull (Yun). Nothing is purely innocent. Nothing is purely dark. The work is a tense balance: Beauty and unease, craft and chaos, humorous and haunted? Materials are chosen like words in a secret language: ceramic, burned wood, airbrushed mist, oil paint, stretched tights. Each object embodies a deliberate, tactile sensibility: Wood is carved in defiance of industrial logic (Paquet), latex and epoxy give form to contested love and gaslit realities (Lee’s “spider”). There is a quiet resistance to slickness in favor of hand-made intimacy. Here, material is memory, and craft is a form of quiet rebellion. The journey begins on a red carpet, with a pair of legs protruding from under “a house” (Skromnaya’s “Oops...”). Like Dorothy, you step past the curtain into a liminal world. Stories slip. They become darker. This is a fairy tale chewed on and left in the dark. The childhood here isn’t a linear path you leave behind. It’s a persistent, leaky archive. Time folds. Gender flips. It feels queer in structure; not always in identity, but in its refusal to straighten anything out. In a political moment defined by fracture, by the violent enforcement of binaries, the flattening of history, and the demand for clear, consumable narratives, these artists return to the unruliness of early memory. Contemporary anguish compels a turn inward, to the primal sites where power, fear, and identity were first configured. The artists do not retreat. They excavate. They trace the origins of our present disquiet in the soft architecture of the past: in the haunted house of the family. These are the blueprints of the monsters we now face in broad daylight. The title riffs on the old mapmakers’ warning of uncharted, perilous lands, Hic sunt dracones “Here be dragons”. We’ve scaled it down. The dragons are domestic now. They are not grandiose myths, but personal hauntings: the kind that linger in the background of memory, in the corners of homes, and in the spaces between fairy-tale lines. They’re in the dollshouse, in the forest, in the spider you loved that no one else saw. They’re small, but they mark the real unknown places: the ones inside us.