Before We Knew Better or We Should All Know Better

Installation view, “Before We Knew Better” at Elise Seigenthaler Gallery/Photo: Charlie Young

The bildungsroman is a genre of novel in which a protagonist comes of age, the hero travels from innocence to experience, the main character emerges from folly to wisdom. It’s a difficult genre to critique when done poorly, at least in my view, for you as a reader have only been given a front-row seat to a character becoming themselves. What can you say in response to a story that wields its perpetual “becoming,” this unformed condition, as a shield and cudgel? Not much for it’s the literary equivalent of the “I’m just a baby” or “I’m just a girl” trend of self-abasement, a degrading way to excuse one’s own lack, an unwillingness to move toward wisdom, knowledge, an answer.

For better or worse I can’t seem to shake this feeling of incompletion, of missing something, of absence when viewing “Before We Knew Better,” the group show with artists Sarah Bedford, Day Brièrre, Josiah Ellner, and Léa LeFloc’h up at Elise Seigenthaler Gallery.

This is not a dig against the artists’ work, for I quite enjoy Ellner’s psychedelic close-ups of unicorn eyes and kaleidoscopic mandalas, not to mention the undulating alien fingers that have populated their paintings since at least 2021. Léa LeFloc’h’s enigmatic works on paper, with their sunlit colors and archaic use of line and shape, remind me too of the uncanny sensation of stumbling upon a stranger’s birthday party and finding yourself singing “and many more” as they blow out the candles on their cake. Sarah Bedford’s nocturnal flowers, painted in the hues of a Golden Age Disney villain, creep and slink with delight. They carry a hint of sex with the endearing admission that they might not entirely understand the act’s mechanics. This isn’t even to mention Day Brièrre’s endlessly intricate trio of ceramic pieces. While Brièrre’s work is unfortunately not served by its installation (the display pedestals that the ceramics are positioned upon seem hurried and a bit of a distraction) discovering the pieces’ shared textures, the loops and whirls hidden within the clay, feels like the revelation of a secret script.

The show’s text notes these artists’ “practices draw on narrative, folklore and personal mythology to explore our enduring relationship with the natural world.” Here then we have the show being positioned within the realm of narrative, memory and myth, yet what are the myths, what are the memories? Where did Bedford’s “Ghost Orchids” (2025) first bloom or LeFloc’h’s “Bubbles” (2026) first pop? I speak in metaphor here but given that the gallery has stated an interest in “work that feels imaginative, and open-ended” I think there is a demarcation that’s fair to make between work that asks you to question its intent, its very presence, and treatment of said work that deploys this uncertainty like a weapon, asking why can’t you, why won’t you figure this out yourself?

Josiah Ellner “Chosen,” 2024. Oil on canvas, 28 x 32 in./Image: Elise Seigenthaler Gallery

At risk of sounding like a broken record, I don’t blame the artists for these curatorial moves. Art I think at its best should provide a somewhat inarticulable aesthetic experience, our meager echo of the sublime. There’s also the growing expectation of artists to be able to speak about their work which I don’t agree with, I don’t need an answer about a painting from its painter. Yet, let’s take Ellner’s unicorn as an example. Unicorns are traditionally vicious creatures, bloodthirsty even, as wild things often are. Why then are Ellner’s “Chosen” (2024) and “Unicorn Eye” (2025) included in a show that is softly dewy with nostalgia? Is it their colors, their almost animated intensity? C’mon we can do better than that.

In Italian author Roberto Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” he writes:

“Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.”

“Before We Knew Better” wants to have it both ways, the gesture and the world, harmony and discordance, without letting viewers in to be truly a part of either.

“Before We Knew Better” at Elise Seigenthaler Gallery, 1709 West Chicago, through June 6.