I Dreamt We Were All Animals

Annette Monnier and Elissa DeFranceschi

November 15th - December, 2025
907 Christian Street, Philadelphia PA 19147

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 15th, 2025 from 7-10PM

Blah Blah Gallery presents I Dreamt We Were All Animals, a two-person exhibition by Annette Monnier and Elissa DeFranceschi, whose works build imagined worlds where logic slips, instincts surface, and the familiar begins to shift.

Since the early 2000s, Annette Monnier has been drawing small black-and-white universes as a way to simplify her life and practice. Each drawing gathers the things she likes, thinks about, or simply enjoys rendering. The more details, the better. Her recent works imagine a party in a beautiful room where every guest has been replaced by an animal. They haven’t transformed so much as been swapped from another dimension. The result is both funny and unsettling: a frozen celebration where human behavior continues, now played out by creatures who seem entirely at ease.

Elissa DeFranceschi, a Philadelphia-based mixed media artist, creates drawings and sculptures guided by intuition and found materials. Her worlds are filled with recurring symbols, animals, and personified objects. With a sense of folklore and childlike wonder, her sculptures translate emotion into form, turning inner visions into something tactile and real. Through repetition and instinct, she builds environments that feel familiar yet dreamlike, where myth and memory overlap.

Together, Monnier and DeFranceschi invite viewers into rooms that feel familiar and uncanny all at once. Whether drawn or sculpted, these imagined spaces, populated by animals, objects, and echoes of ourselves, reflect the strangeness of being human in a world that is always half dream.