Seven deadly delights

When is the last time you felt as wrathful as a force of nature? Or as envious as a wicked stepparent in a fairy tale? Nearby exhibits focusing on the seven deadly sins provide much food for thought about our some of our most intense feelings.

Wave Hill’s show on “Wrath—Force of Nature” and the Hudson River Museum’s “Envy: One Sin, Seven Stories” are part of a series of seven shows at members of the Fairfield/Westchester Museum Alliance. While the concept might seem, well, medieval, the works on display make for a scintillating exploration that hits close to home.

For its exposé of envy, the Hudson River Museum, located at 511 Warburton Ave. in Yonkers, commissioned multimedia artist Adrien Broom to create scenes from seven fairy tales, most of them known to us through the Brothers Grimm.

Ms. Broom’s macabre interpretations are a far cry from the popular Disney versions. Her series on Snow White features an envious queen feasting on a heart in one image. At the end of the sequence, we see the heroine take grim revenge on her tormenter by making her dance herself to death in coal-hot clogs.

Subtle sin

A pair of splendid black and white gowns crowns the show, with dark chords extending between the faces of mannequins floating above visitors. Mirrors dangle from the trim of the garments, suggesting an endless refraction of emotions that inculpates both the envious and the envied. To repeat: Ms. Broom’s Snow White tortured her stepmom to death.

Notwithstanding the spectacular outcomes of many of the fairy tales, Hudson River Museum curator Bart Bland noted, “Envy, I think, is the most subtle of all the sins. It tends to be the most internalized of them.”

“To be envious of someone, you tend to have to really be close enough to them or be enough on their level that there is sort of a direct comparison you can make between yourself [and that person],” he continued. “I’m not going to become envious of George Clooney or a movie star or the president of the United States. The distance is too great for envy to occur.”