Jill Milenski

With my fairy tale series of assemblages, I hope to shed light on how the fairy tales of yesteryear can apply to today’s world. If you look at the original version of these tales in the German or French, there was a lot of darkness that has been sanitized for modern readers.

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But something shifted between the time that I grew up and the time my children did. The cliché helpless princesses have been transformed by Disney films into enlightened powerful young women. Or they create new tales to fit what today’s young girls will accept. Old tales, such as Rapunzel, have been flipped on their head so that the heroine is no longer a victim.

 

I applaud these re-writings of classic fairytales. But my work also tries to illuminate the darkness that I see creeping into our world again: school shootings, child abuse, sexism, hopelessness, kids in cages. These are things we had hoped were solidly in the past. These tales originally served as warnings about the dangers of the world: the wolf at the door, the troll under the bridge, the princess in the tower, the sharp object and the briars…these are all warnings of dangers to children. Today’s dangers are found in supposedly ”safe spaces,” in the home, in the church, in the school, in the streets. We are no longer hiding from wild animals in the woods, most likely because we have destroyed those woods and those natural places. It is the human monsters we must fear today.

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The language flashcards in many of the works uses a single definition to illuminate the overall message of each piece: "palatable," "unscathed," and "precipitous." Definitions in other languages hint at the original language of some of these tales (the Brothers Grimm/German, Charles Perrault/French) and lend mystery and setting to the pieces.