Spoof.Project is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition: If You Go Into the Woods Today..., a group exhibition of figurative painting and sculpture that draws from folklore, fantasies and fairytales. Borrowing its title from the familiar refrain of Henry Hall’s “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” the exhibition transforms a nostalgic phrase into a reference point for narrative painting. The artists, Lauren Sanderfer, Noah Trapolino, and Matthew Mitchell, play with figuration in the context and form of myth in a sensual, provocative way that flirts with but resists narration. Classical tropes of fragments from a large story, an older moment - a representation, a synecdoche even, of the current cultural relationship with the ancient love affair between visual art and narration.

The works presented here emerge from a long-standing tension between image-making and the traditions of storytelling. Rooted in classical techniques, they both challenge and pay homage to contemporary visual culture, drawing from the past while resisting its hierarchies. Historically, representation was often in service of power—of kings, gods, and nationhood. In contrast, these works move toward a more porous and sensuous, aesthetic, privileging perception, and ambiguity over authority. This shift does not abandon the past but reconfigures it. The sublime persists: the power of nature, the resonance of myth, and the construction of identity remain central concerns. Painting, in this sense, still operates within a structured inheritance—one shaped by religious and mythological frameworks in which the body functioned as a vehicle for transcendence, a means of expressing divine truth. Within that lineage, the erotic and the sacred have long existed in parallel, at times in tension, at times intertwined.

The contemporary artists gathered here reflect a broader return to figuration within today’s cultural landscape—one that has, in many ways, distanced itself from the narrative depth of folklore and myth. Their work suggests not a rejection of these traditions, but a renewed engagement with them. The body becomes a site of negotiation: sensuous, vulnerable, and entangled with the forces of nature and the lingering anxieties of myth.