Once Upon a Time… Issue #39

Let Krista Huot tell you a story of violent unicorns and kickass heroines

By Jolene Torr
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 3:15pm

Through bramble and briar, thorn and weed, a young maiden once journeyed far from her forest home in British Columbia to Montreal’s hippest ‘hood: The Plateau. It was in this inspired part of town — with its brightly-colored Edwardians, charming cafés, and booming music scene — that the young maiden was swept along with the classic laissez-faire attitude of the residents, taking up the life of an artist.

Our fair maiden is Krista Huot, a 28-year-old artist who uses myth and fairytale to express the epic conflict of dark and light within her own life. “Sometimes the paintings are about friendships, about love,” she says. “Other times, about destructive behavior or discovering something about yourself.” Fierce unicorns and virtuous maidens bond, battle, and bleed in Huot’s paintings, dreamy worlds in which a unicorn can gut a girl and kill our childhood memories of the beasts. How the betrayal of a unicorn can fuck with one’s insecurity in the modern world!

Listening to everything from Bowie to Carcass, Huot channels this juxtaposition of light and dark in her fantastical dreamscapes. Not only do the unicorns betray, the chaste ingénues become tough shit, and, stunned in the moment of flight, perhaps at their own ferociousness, harsh heroines. “I try to keep things a bit in between the realms of cute and dark whenever I can,” says Huot. “Maybe that’s the heavy metal coming through!”

These heroines, with their large eyes and oval faces, toothy grins and pleading expressions, echo a history of naïve graphics and bold color, of highly stylized and graphically simplistic cartoonism, dynamic and delirious in spatial compression. It’s no surprise that Huot is a fan of concept artists Eyvind Earle and Mary Blair — both Disney artists from the mid-20th century who are widely considered responsible for modern cartoon art.

Deliberately drawing on Earle and Blair’s design influences and geometrical abstraction, Huot also finds thematic inspiration, as both concept artists created images centered around the fairytale. For Huot’s March show at Gallery 1988 in San Francisco, she turns to Little Red Riding Hood, of course. “As a coming of age story and a morality tale,” she begins as she discusses the theme behind the work, “the idea of choosing paths through the forest in order to get to a final destination and the things one encounters on that journey.” It’s this journey that appeals most to Huot, this epic tale that must repeat itself, like the rings of a tree, because as the artist herself admits, “That’s how I’ve been feeling lately, like I’m on a journey.”