Contributed by Wells Chandler / Inserted in extravagant interiors, the hybrid creatures in Hannah Barrett’s paintings, now on view at Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown alongside the work of four others, embody both psychic and material liminality, performing the delicate work of chronicling personal and cultural becoming. As seraphic intermediaries contemplated by the likes of Hildegard von Bingen, Barrett’s elastically protean tricksters play as queer homunculi, perhaps resurrected from the margins of illuminated medieval manuscripts, reanimated and thriving in Victorian polychrome. Cloistered in very gay Akashic libraries, they are fierce androgynous gatekeepers, summoning rune light from somewhere over the rainbow.
Barrett presents sprites and elves as animating forces who safeguard thresholds. In folklore, sprites inhabit the in-between, mediating order and wildness. “Sprite” is from the Latin word spiritus, meaning breath or spirit. In psychedelic circles, spirit animates matter through endogenous dimethyltryptamine – DMT, also known as the spirit molecule – secreted from the pineal gland. DMT plays a role in REM sleep, near-death experiences, and certain mystical states. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna describes the entities encountered on DMT as “self-transforming machine elves.” And indeed, Barrett’s fractal, ever-morphing, playful psychopomps bestow gifts of knowledge to seekers traveling the unknown.
Like antiheroes in fairy tales, Barrett’s characters straddle and dissolve binary divisions. The male and female, grotesque and refined, wild and domesticated exist simultaneously, conjoining all worlds. Unbounded mutant joy illuminates the absurdity of taxonomy and categorization. Resistance is futile! A gnarly snapping turtle thumb has already plunged deeply into every alpine pie. In each deceptively tidy corner, the antiseptic chambers of the rational mind have been breached. The hills are kaleidoscopically alive! A cyclops, with labial knees that have endured too much, is on the loose. As Barrett’s charming canvases declare, queerdos are here to stay.
Barrett’s polymorphously perverse librarians, detectives, and scholars command libraries and offices customarily reserved for safekeeping conventional knowledge and instead preserve queer history. Judging by the notation of a lederhosen-clad researcher roaming a bucolic field in Montanvert, you can learn a lot from flowers, including dandy-speak. Methodical, systematized, and fastidious, Barrett’s critters unworld regulation and co-create for oddkins. Floral familiars, fruit bowls, mushrooms, and snail helpers – symbols of queer identity – reverberate throughout, mirroring gender nonconformity as intrinsic to the structure of reality.
In Barrett’s cheerfully disruptive hands, color becomes a queer strategy for challenging normative austerity. In chromatic rebellion, Barrett’s psychedelic hermitages violate sterile logic, warming putatively regimented spaces. Queer code punctuates their paintings, defying legibility and promoting secrecy. Relax, we are all friends of Dorothy. At once ancient and futuristic, mystical language is logged in ledgers, transcribed from notebooks, typed on mycelial computing devices, and printed out on scrolls. Barrett thus records how queer stories find their way into history and celebrates the boon of discovering one’s difference, the glee of belonging to a tribe of deep freaks, and the battle of forging agency for future generations. At the heart of their playfully noble work is the refusal to be bureaucratically erased.
Hannah Barrett, Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA. Through August 19, 2025.
About the author:Wells Chandler is a Bronx-based artist and writer who explores ecology, community, gender, and queer iconography through the mediums of crochet, embroidery, drawing, and cake.
