Once upon a time, in a faraway land, like Oz, Neverland, or Wonderland, a wicked witch melts, children fly, and a little girl holds conversations with a broad grinning feline. The moment the words “once upon a time” are spoken, the audience suspends their disbelief, immediately transported to a spaceless, timeless dreamplace where they accept the irrational. My body of work explores the impossibilities of this nonsensical dreamspace, where reality and fairy tales collide, through the lens of magical realism. 

My drawings and paintings are composite images formulated through collaged elements to create a narrative. I use a combination of my own photographs, my imagination, and working from life. It’s through this amalgamation of everyday imagery, rendered through realism, that I ground the audience in reality; however, through space, chaos, and costume, a magical disruption occurs. Akin to the nonsense of fairy tales where you can fall down a never-ending rabbit hole down-side up, my work leans into the absurd through orderly disorder. 

While the impossibilities of accumulated textiles, utter spacelessness, and defiance of gravity suggest chaos, I establish a system of order through compositional balance, rhythm, and repetition. In my drawings, it’s through the loss of linear perspective (the vast white negative space) that the impossibilities of the fairytale dreamspace can unfold. In my paintings, spacelessness is replaced by the natural world. Throughout literature, the natural world exists as a metaphor for the unknown and a mirror to the subconscious. While my self-portrait in my drawings and some figures in my paintings recognize the absence or presence of space, holding the audience in an authoritative gaze, other figures fall victim to their surroundings, seduced and enchanted by it.

Brianna Angelakis is an exhibiting artist whose work has been featured in museums and galleries across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Cincinnati. A New England native who relocated to Florida, she earned her BFA in Fine Arts and BA in English from Flagler College, followed by an MFA in Art from the University of Florida. Following her studies, she served as an Artist-in-Residence at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, and has exhibited her work at the Hand Art Center, Harn Museum of Art, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, and the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. She currently lives in the Greater Orlando area with her husband and 4-year-old son, where she balances her studio practice with her roles as an Adjunct Studio Art Professor at Stetson University and as a Graphic Designer at HH Global for Google.