I dated a grad school student once, for a brief time, who was studying Jungian psychology. One evening they shared with me an interesting lens through which to look at one’s own life, which they said begins by asking a single question: “What myth am I living?” A question Carl Jung coined in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

At the time, I was contemplating getting a tattoo of a falling Icarus, a symbol of man’s ambition and its consequences. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was the psycho-subtextual layer within the myth that mirrored my own life - namely, the relationship between a father and son, which this ex-partner pointed out. Lessons were garnered, to say the least, and the tattoo reconsidered. Because the prevailing wisdom is: what one tells themself - both explicitly and implicitly - one continues to live. I was left with this understanding: one ought to choose the myth they tell themselves wisely.

Naturally, the original question “what myth am I living?” begets others. It brought me back to a question my film professor, David Martín-Porras, asked on my first day of class at the nearby UCLA facility nearly six years ago: Why do humans tell stories? After some silence and a wave of half answers, Martín-Porras revealed his own: something along the lines of, “We tell stories because it’s the only way humans can understand something as inconceivable as life” - a spectrum of incomprehensible joy and tragedy, love and fear. In Martín-Porras’ view, stories are a way for human beings to make meaning of the meaningless, an attempt to exert control over the uncontrollable. Let us not forget that myths may also act as concealed critiques toward systems of oppression, as they have throughout history.

It is through this lens of self-inquiry - and, admittedly, a matter of artistic taste - that Fable & Form came to be. The latter, taste, was recently and succinctly described by Deborah Lauter for Artnet in an article exploring contemporary painting trends. As she aptly notes, there’s a movement of post-contemporary artists who use “blurred painting techniques” to “make borders hard to define and render figures as moving, fluid, and optically vertiginous.” [1]This, along with “a mass resurgence of interest in Surrealism” and a “renewed interest in spiritualism,” are all present in this show - with artists utilizing softly blended boundaries, depicting apocalyptic visions of an everyday alternative reality, and exploring Western mythology through a non-Western or pre-Christian cultural lens. Somehow, all roads have led to this, in a manner of speaking.

Fable & Form is my indulgent side coming out to play curator, working with a particularly meaningful group of artists based in Los Angeles and Chicago - from various backgrounds, with one thing in common: a shared understanding and practice of creating fantastical paintings and sculptures rife with mythological influence and contemporary relevance. Even the way this group of artists was assembled feels mythical, given all that needed to occur to make this exhibition happen.

It’s only fair I start at the beginning with Ashkon Haidari, whose paintings hold learnings through lived experience - visualized through surrealistic figures in expansive and foreign landscapes, between here and somewhere beyond this plane. Persian myth and sensibility are reconstituted through his Chicago upbringing, containing hints at cultural enmeshment and the beauty of life distilled into fable. Non-western mixed with Western ideals find their way into the surrealistic landscapes on display in this show by Alex McAdoo, where they take on a whole new form, drawn from a practice connected to the origin story of vanishing points. The numerical implementation of the number zero - an Arabic contribution to Western society - birthed the vanishing point in art, and it is this story that McAdoo infuses into his post-contemporary depictions of landscape, creating an unlikely relationship between science and fantasy.

In a year filled with painful transformations, imagining a post-apocalyptic world has become part of the culture, birthing subcultures which wholly embrace potential realities. Katya Labowe-Stoll imagines a world after the flood, where evolution begins again through water and fluid identity. Her figures exist in a mythic ecology - beings between species, time, and memory. They are reforming in a reformed world, with the only constant, change. Amia Yokoyama also imagines an alternate world, where circumstance has dictated mutation for survival. Yokoyama likens the characters and environments in her world to viruses, that spawn from each other to simply exist.  Like Labowe-Stoll, Yokoyama intuits a future world inspired by science and science fiction, where myth has taken shape and humans have become hyper feminized, existing like a fungus, and replicating aromatically. Yet, Yokoyama differs in that her characters are rooted in an aggregation of Japanese myths throughout time. One reoccurring figure, tied to myth, is her ‘slime girl’, a human like feminine creature born from the swamp. These ideations by Yokoyama feel disturbingly comforting, given the underlying subtext.

Explorations of sex, gender and identity in myth find their way into this show. Aleza Zheng reclaims the feminine and recognizable Western goddesses and narrates their rebellion - containing hints that their desires are greater than the confines of the roles defined for them. This combination of recognizable forms, and their subversion, suggests an expansion of collective understanding. Ending with Assata Mason makes alto much sense, as her work goes beyond gender into a space of the sacred, and depicts herself as deity and demon, as a sort of meditation on cultural ancestry and autonomy. Two nearly identical figures face one another with aggressive postures as if to suggest that our conflicts in life begin and end with our own resistance to change in whatever form.

This is a show of layered truths and hidden symbols. Of surrealism not as a style, but as a way of seeing. What these artists have made, in form, in fable, is both reflective and prophetic. A quiet act of resistance. A speculative act of care.

So now, I ask you: What myth are you living?

Fable & Form runs from August 3rd to August 31st, 2025, at Sabbatikal, 1226 25th Street, Santa Monica, CA. The opening reception will take place on August 3rd from 5 to 8 PM and is open to the public. Please RSVP as space is limited. Afterward, visits are available by appointment or during scheduled events. Sabbatikal hosts bi-weekly private gatherings that provide additional opportunities to engage with the exhibition.

We invite you to join us at Sabbatikal and experience this convergence of art, reflection, and community.

…

For inquiries on price and availability please connect with Sacha Cohen either in person or by way of one of the resources provided below:

Tel. +1 (508) 237-9457 | E-mail. on@sabbatikal.com | Website. www.sabbatikal.com

[1] Deborah Lauter, “What These 4 Trends in
Painting Reveal About Our Image-Saturated Age,” Artnet, July 6, 2025, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/contemporary-painting-trends-2025-2659653.