Mary Barczak is a local Columbus resident who resides in Franklinton. Her works portray the sense of humor she’s developed in the face of adversity, depression, and anxiety.
Everyone looks back on childhood fondly. Even if you didn’t have a great childhood there are aspects of childhood innocence that when you are an adult you fantasize about. Nostalgia for times when things were simpler, for when you were reading stories with glossy pages filled with illustrations of fantastical scenes.
This body of work addresses the complexities of real life and the fantasies that so many of us are familiar with. Fairytales are for children, or so we tell ourselves, but the stories themselves become part of the adult psyche.
Mary’s way of addressing stories is more so about the secondary characters and villains than its heroes. Heroes tend to be written in such a way that anyone can read themselves into their shoes and become part of the story. Their flaws are downplayed or non-existent. It’s the characteristics of secondary characters and villains that then drive the storyline, because normally if left to their own devices, heroes would kind of be a drag.
Beauty would stay home and read a book. The Three Little Pigs would probably be sitting on a sofa in their houses, or going to Home Depot to fix their poor construction jobs. Cinderella would be living peacefully in a cottage with her father but probably still have household chores albeit not as many and she could probably bathe.
Flaws create the stories, and beloved characters from your favorite books are built up on the backs of lesser characters who have their flaws and act upon them. Alice just came to the tea party, she didn’t throw it. If she did things would probably be a lot more subdued.
To visually show these concepts the artist utilizes blindfolds for characters with lesser traits, the characters that folks can see themselves being. For the flawed, she creates masks out of construction paper, another childlike material that is fairly fleeting. This lends itself to the illustrative quality of the storybooks of yore.