There are monsters in the gallery

For many people, the thought of monsters lurking in the shadows is a metaphor for some horrible secret that must be kept hidden away.

For Laura O’Connor, she actually has a fear of a monster in her closet. I can see it right there on the wall, just as she depicted it — a mass of long and tangled green tentacles reaching right out from behind a closet door that should have been closed and locked and barricaded.

This is just one of the pieces in The Monster in Your Closet, the new group show opening tomorrow at the Art Gallery of St. Albert. Five artists have brought together their deepest fears and darkest musings all for the exhibit.

O’Connor’s 17 pieces are probably the most light-hearted of the lot. She has crafted tiny felt figures or objects that demonstrate the fear superimposed on her photographs to provide additional context or explanation. The small square-framed pieces are probably the most accessible works in the exhibit, too, for how easily the audience should be able to comprehend them and relate to them.

Of course, some — like the aforementioned monster in her closet — are more obvious, while a few others are confusingly obscure. I get the references to health or life expectancy, or computers failing. There’s even a complete blank that makes sense as the fear of failure.

Without the benefit of the little descriptive placard that provides the artist’s own words, I’m forced to ask her the meaning of the one with a figure with tiny threads that seem to be sprouting out all over its body.

“It just hit the news not too long ago that they discovered a fungus that basically turns insects into zombies and takes control over their minds and bodies,” she began, sounding as if she was preparing research for a National Geographic horror story. “The fungus grows out of the back of its head and the spores break out and infect a bunch of other insects.”

I’m sorry that I ever asked. She continues on with stories about her ophthalmologist, a man who she says looks distinctly like M. Night Shyamalan, warning her about her physiological predisposition to suffer a detached retina. When you look at the little doll in the green polka dot dress, its eye dangling by the nerve, you realize that this artist harbours many phobias. She quotes Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris who said, “Fear comes with imagination. It’s a penalty; it’s the price of imagination.”

If that’s the case, then she indeed has an active imagination and can probably continue this series for a long, long time.

Mark Goodchild, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have fears or monsters at the heart of his series. The atheist and self-described formalist 1960s abstract expressionist painter refers to them as “slight anxieties ... things that I have questions about. It all has to do with faith because I have none.”

His abstract works play between the great unknowns of science and religion, two separate ideologies that don’t always see eye to eye. The balance of colours, both light and dark, seems to suggest a tenuous meeting of divergent contradictions, possibly suggesting that there’s a middle ground where even enemies could be close friends.

“I started to wonder why I question one faith and not the other,” Goodchild said. “I can’t comprehend quantum physics necessarily, but I find it fascinating. It’s just as mythological as the parting of seas and other concepts in religion. Science is just as fanciful.”

The other works in the show include architect Chung Cheuk Hung’s painted and digitally manipulated characters that look like genetically bastardized creatures with oversized heads, the arms growing right out of their cheeks or mouths.

These are still fairly friendly compared with the violent graffiti from the Psychotic Robotic Art Collective, the creative duo of Edmonton’s Chris Zaystoff and Tristan McClelland. Their stone-faced ghost figures meet monstrous insects and Pac-Man characters with large gnashing teeth, paint dripping everywhere among random cityscapes of strange information and buzzwords that seemingly foretell our doom. These images might be the monsters of the show themselves.