Altered Familiar traces the symbolic transformation of innocence into instinct, and of recognition into revelation. The exhibition begins with the language of childhood: toys, animals, softness, attachment, and the objects we once trusted before we understood the complexity of desire, identity, or self-protection. Anchored by Maïté Côté’s hyperreal teddy bears, these early symbols of comfort are not preserved as nostalgia. They are changed. Their skins become camouflage, armor, memory, and warning. What was once held for safety begins to reveal something wilder beneath the surface.
As the viewer moves through the gallery, the familiar continues to mutate. Childhood gives way to metamorphosis. Metamorphosis gives way to the body. The body becomes a site of beauty, seduction, power, vulnerability, and psychological tension. In this movement, transformation is not only visual. It is emotional and erotic, marking the passage from innocence into the charged awareness of the self.
Hyperrealism plays a central role in this unfolding. Its precision intensifies the viewer’s encounter with skin, fur, surface, texture, and flesh. It makes transformation feel immediate, intimate, and almost touchable. The more convincing the image becomes, the more unstable it feels. What appears real begins to reveal fantasy, projection, and unease.
Abstraction and surrealism extend this instability further. Forms blur, symbols loosen, and recognizable images drift into dream, myth, atmosphere, and subconscious space. Together, the artists in Altered Familiar create a passage from the held object to the desired body, from the familiar image to the transformed self, from childhood softness to the strange and powerful terrain of becoming.
The exhibition asks what we become when innocence changes skin, when beauty becomes charged, and when the familiar reveals the instincts it once concealed.
