My Little Pony Introduces Herself to the Galactic by Teal Wilson 2021

This past weekend my husband and I drove to Aspen, Colorado to see an exhibit by our daughter, Teal Wilson.  The exhibit was at Fat City Gallery, in Aspen Colorado, and was a show Teal had been working towards for most of the summer.  I didn't know quite what to expect, but was somewhat apprehensive since I knew it involved "My Little Pony", the iconic plastic toy pony, first developed in 1981, and which has had several reincarnations since. As an artist, and the mother of an artist, I knew to keep my doubts to myself and hadn't either discussed the work with Teal or really known much about it, aside from the fact that it was "My Little Pony".  However, upon seeing the work, I was, as the cliche goes, "blown away"  by what she had done.  The images, 16 in total, were a complex combination of exquisite drawings of My Little Pony and powerful, black ink washes. But it was the titles that made the show so impactful, each one describing a complex and complicated reality that the ponies were caught up in.  Their cute coyness  became something else by the significance of the titles, titles like "My Little Pony and the Second Between Existence and the Gates of Heaven" and "My Little Pony Peers into the Celestial Plane".  She had done that thing that is so hard to do when making an image: she had captured our complete attention, with skill and patience, so that we had to look at the world in an entirely new way, treading the razor edge of both trite and profound.