Don’t Wake Mom & Dad

Don’t Wake Mom & Dad explores the often eerie and uncomfortable recollection of childhood, nostalgia, gender expectations, and self-identity.

In the recreation of an American nuclear family, we use iconography often associated with mediums of vintage or analog horror to re-frame the gallery’s collection of art and advertisements. This juxtaposition of art, memory, childhood and horror is used to analyze how societal mechanizations shape us, and how the assumption of a gendered binary experience gives little leeway for creativity, empathy, and growth.

Don’t Wake Mom & Dad features the work of Darcie Blake, Fernanda Diaz, and Zack Fontaine.

Darcie Blake is an interdisciplinary artist focusing primarily on illustration and photography. Her illustrative work draws inspiration from 90s and 00s children’s toys and media, giving her work a sense of childlike optimism and wonder with a balance of adult themes like mental illness and cynicism. She is a resident artist of Wrong Brain, an alternative art organization based in Dover, NH, and attended Montserrat from 2018 to 2019. She is also co-founder of Rock Water Film Festival and founder of an inclusive open-mic standup night. You can find more of her work on instagram @darcie.blake.

Fernanda Diaz is a multimedia artist with a primary focus on animation production. A proud Tejana who moved up north to pursue post-secondary education, she aims to join the TV entertainment industry as a Visual Development Artist. Her obsession with internet mysteries and the paranormal combined with experiences of her perceptual limbo millennial and gen-z childhood have contributed to her style of drawing. Her artwork is heavily inspired by nostalgia and creepy cute aesthetics for all ages.

Zack Fontaine is a cross-disciplinary artist and educator from the northeast corner of Connecticut. He primarily works in sculpture and painting, utilizing themes of childhood and the medium of toys to interrogate how they can affect the current reality of our world. He forged his unique stylistic choices and medium of work during the original COVID-19 quarantine in early 2020 while dabbling in playing board games as a method of painting or drawing. Later that year, he dove head first into stuffed animals as a material.

Don’t Wake Mom & Dad was curated by Alexia Avila, Kali Orna, and Sam Rose.

Special thank you to Hannah Daigle, Kiran Marwaha, Max Foster, and Will Higgins for assisting in putting up the mural.