Way Back When Playpen (2022) Collages by Toby Leon

In the 'Way Back When Playpen,' time collapses into itself. A surrealist digital collage, it's a symphony of myths, a congregation of forgotten gods, and an echo of ancient narratives.

Behold, the curious spectacle of Hanuman, a conch-playing nymph, and a petrified dinosaur skeleton hanging out in a broken-down funfair ride. Rusting away in the back of an abandoned lot.

This paradoxical playground is no random assembly of whimsy. It's a parallel universe, a place of anti-space where the outcasts of our collective memories and narratives frolic in a celebration of the overlooked and the forgotten. It is a comment on how society has grown so accustomed to venerating the new and reinventing the wheel — relegating its own history, its own imagination, its own gods and monsters to the sidelines. As if they were but infants confined to an eternal playpen. Reminding us we’re all the children of myths and legends, and to confine them to the past is to confine a part of ourselves.

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Series Statement

My digital collage series, "Candy Babel’s Carnival for Kidults" is a metaphorical midway. Drawing from the ancient narrative of the Tower of Babel, a monument of human audacity that was splintered into a mélange of tongues and cultures, I find connection with echoes of the travelling circus — bringing together disparate groups of people ‘under one tent’. In this reconstructed Babel, the tower becomes a stage, a spectacle, where the othered and the marginalized, the 'freaks,' dare to exist in their full, vibrant humanity. And people pay to see it. Encapsulating the essence of play in its purest form — joyous, unifying, transformative.

In this carnival, play isn’t recreational, it’s revolutionary. The carnival becomes a tableau vivant, where each performance is an act of rebellion and acceptance, a safe space in the most vulnerable of places — on stage. The queer, the different, the non-normative, can all find a home here, shining stars in this periphery.

I present to you a kaleidoscopic world that basks in its rainbow otherness. Revelling in its queerness. Through this work, I hope to engage in a dialogue about the myriad ways in which we express and experience our humanity. I aim to challenge perceptions, to provoke thought, and to celebrate the beautiful complexity of our existence. Come, the carnival, and rediscover the world through the vibrant lens of Candy Babel's Carnival for Kidults.

Related themes

Rainbow