Hannah Epstein: Plato’s Goon Cave

Winter/Spring 2026 Exhibition at MSVU Art Gallery

Hannah Epstein, Plato’s Goon Cave, 2025–2026, work in progress. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hannah Epstein: Plato’s Goon Cave

Curated by Blair Fornwald
February 7 – May 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 7, 1:00 – 3:00pm
Artist Talk and Exhibition Tour: Saturday, February 7, 1:30pm
MSVU Art Gallery, Halifax

Hannah Epstein combines textiles and digital media to create characters, immersive environments, and stories that explore contemporary desires and anxieties through a folkloric lens. In Plato’s Goon Cave, she stages a slippery allegory of epistemic uncertainty in a media-saturated present.

The work is a funhouse-mirror inversion and a contemporary revisioning of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Illustrating the cognitive trap of ignorance, Plato imagines a group of people chained inside a dark cave, who are subjected to endless shadow-puppet play, which they mistake for reality. A freed prisoner, he reasons, would be so overstimulated by the world outside, that they would return to the cave, preferring the simplicity of the simulated world. Epstein, conversely, imagines a cave where the simulations have become chaotic, fascinating and deeply stimulating. The hulking goons that populate her installation—collectively named after the practice of sustaining a euphoric, trance-like state through prolonged masturbation or other self-soothing, repetitive behaviors—are unchained. They seem complacent and oddly self-sufficient, goggle-eyed and grinning in their cave, which is awash with AI-generated video projections animating them with narrative complexity, ontological ambiguity, and something approaching vitality.

Epstein’s work address ways that technology troubles and transcends logic: What happens when simulations of reality are no longer affixed to real-world referents? When they are generative and deeply synchronous, attuned to our subconscious desires and anxieties? At what point do they become something else entirely? And at what point might gooning out to this slop become strangely productive?

About the Artist

Hannah Epstein (aka Hanksi) is a Nova Scotian artist who works in textiles and digital media. She received a B.A. in Folklore from Memorial University in 2009 and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto; the Long Beach Museum of Art and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles in California; the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; and The Rooms in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Related Programming

Crafternoon: Rug Hooking with Hannah Epstein
Tuesday, March 10, 12:00 – 2:00pm
Mount Saint Vincent Library & Archives, 15 Lumpkin Road

Come craft, unwind, and learn how artist Hannah Epstein uses rug-hooking, a centuries-old medium with its roots in Atlantic Canadian folk art, to explore the anxieties, desires, and fixations of the chronically online.

Learn the basics of this resourceful, therapeutic, and endlessly-adaptable craft, and how Epstein uses it to connect past and present, depicting grinning demons, internet memes, and AI slop to examine how contemporary folktales emerge and circulate.

Meet in the Library for this fun and informative craft session. Beginners, experienced-rug hookers, and first-timers alike are welcome to attend. All materials and supplies will be provided.

Presented in partnership by the Mount Saint Vincent Library & Archives and MSVU Art Gallery.

About MSVU Art Gallery

Opened in 1971, MSVU Art Gallery is dedicated to contemporary art with an emphasis on women as cultural subjects and producers. Exhibitions explore various forms and highlight the achievements of artists in all career phases. MSVU Art Gallery promotes critical access to its exhibitions through publications, lectures, and educational programs, recognizing socially engaged practices as models of aesthetic distinction and political imagination. Consistent with the principle that exhibition spaces are civic spaces, the Gallery is committed to normalizing accessible presentation practices throughout its public programs. Admission is always free.

MSVU Art Gallery and Mount Saint Vincent University are situated on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral, unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Acknowledgements

MSVU Art Gallery thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Halifax Regional Municipality for their generous support.

MSVU Art Gallery
166 Bedford Highway
Halifax, NS B3M 2J6
www.msvuart.ca
art.gallery@msvu.ca
902-457-6160

Facebook @msvuartgallery
Instagram @msvuartgallery

Accessibility:
MSVU is partially accessible. For more information, visit the Plan Your Visit page on our website. Please feel free to reach out to art.gallery@msvu.ca with any access requests, service needs, or inquiries.

Image Description:
A large soft sculpture of a monster, crafted out of found fabric, is slumped in the corner of the artists’ studio hallway. Its facial features—horns, large, angry-looking eyes, and a wide, toothy grin are patchworked and embroidered on a rug-hooked teal head. Its body is made out of pink striped fabric, The monster’s long arms, made from light blue floral print fabric rest on its red fabric legs, which are widely splayed, framing its genitalia. One bent leg rests on the floor while the other dangles over the half-wall of the stairwell. The hallway walls are painted beige, and above one of the monster’s horns there is a red sign with an arrow pointing toward the fire extinguisher, and the dark grey carpeting has been patched with a small mismatched square of slubby tan striped carpet.