Personal Mythologies

About

Elza Kayal Gallery is pleased to present “Personal Mythologies”, a group show of three extraordinary female artists. The selected works tackle metaphorical and symbolic concepts of community, and also within, a desire for self-understanding and self-healing.

Personal myths develop and evolve from our experiences, from stories that we hear or read, through the cultural and political environment, and through education. It's an open story, constantly changing, updated by influences, not something unreal. Consciously and unconsciously, we all have a deep longing to understand our place in the world and understand ourselves, and we construct narratives to that end. These stories are powerful and captivating, and in spite of their universal frameworks, they are very personal and can have a great effect on us and the viewers. The expressive works straddle the figurative and non-figurative border, often surreal, and tap into the vulnerability and interconnectedness of people.

'I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations. I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: ”What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust. I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks…'

– C. G. Jung