Hannah Epstein: Plato's Goon Cave
2026-02-07 - 2026-05-17
Curated by Blair Fornwald
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?
image: Hannah Epstein, Plato’s Goon Cave, 2025-2026, work in progress. Image courtesy of the artist.
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.
Opening Reception
Saturday, February 7 from 1:00pm – 3:00pm.
Please join us on Saturday February 7 from 1:00-3:00pm for a relaxed opening reception, Hannah Epstein: Plato’s Goon Cave. Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome to attend!
Artist Talk & Exhibition Tour
Saturday, February 7 at 1:30pm
Crafternoon: Rug Hooking with Hannah Epstein
Tuesday, March 10, 12:00pm – 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 Print Hub 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.
