Jesse Mockrin’s A story told this many times becomes the forest (2025): Reframing Classical Mythology to Dismantle the Male Gaze

The classical Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne has inspired art throughout centuries, GianLorenzo Bernini’s marble statue Apollo and Daphne, being amongst the most famous. Modern interpretations of the story include Sophia Stid’s poem Daphne Pursued by Apollo (2020), and Jesse Mockrin’s Triptych A story told this many times becomes the forest (2025), the latter’s namesake owed to the first line in Stid’s poem. Mockrin’s triptych is part of her larger body of work created in response to her study of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent European Baroque art collection. Mockrin’s solo exhibition, Echo, at the AGO, in conjunction with the exhibition book Jesse Mockrin’s Echo showcase A story told this many times becomes the forest. While studying the collection Mockrin picked up on the repeated violence towards women in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Jewish and Christian bibles. Her new body of work came out of the necessity to re-imagine the stories of women like Syrinx, Daphne, and Echo, in order to “offer insight into how and why society still expects women to be treated with cruelty and seems to delight in their suffering”. Mockrin sheds new light on the unsettling violent truths that are often overlooked, behind these myths by zooming in on the female subject and switching focus from the men in the story. A story told this many times becomes the forest depicts the myth of Apollo and Daphne, where the female figures in the triptych are Daphne repeated thrice in different physical manifestations, the arms grasping onto her belonging to Apollo. In the myth Daphne undergoes a metamorphosis, turning into a laurel tree as an attempt to escape unwanted pursuit of her, ultimately turning into an eternal symbol of Apollo: the laurel wreath. Stid’s poem brings attention to the inability of her father, who turns her into the tree, to stop the act of violence against her, but the ability to transform her into a tree. Through analyzing the poem, myth, and Mockrin’s painting within Freudian frameworks the  metamorphoses necessity reveals itself: the transformation appeases the castration anxiety complex, where the woman is no longer the threatening image of the castrated man, rather she is turned into a non-threatening object, where all that is left is her beauty to be looked upon. Mockrin presents Apollo as nothing but a disembodied arm in the triptych, echoing Daphne’s loss of bodily autonomy and depicting a metaphorical castration where Apollo's arm represents the phallus. The same narrative presented three times in the triptych destabilizes Daphne’s objectification one at a time, while presenting the image of the castrated man (Daphne) with the castrated phallus (Apollo’s arm) creating an unsettling image that plays upon the castration complex in order to dismantle and call attention to the perverse fantasy that echoes throughout history, mythology, and art. 

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A story told this many times becomes the forest (2025) is a triptych done in oil on linen. Each panel of the triptych is forty-nine by thirty-three inches, totalling to forty-nine by ninety-nine inches. Each panel contains the same subject’s: Daphne, Apollo’s arm, and the laurel tree all set on a flat black background. However, each panel conveys a slightly different story; in the leftmost panel Daphne is blonde, worried, front lit, with laurel leaves beginning to sprout from her fingers; the middle panel depicts Daphne as a brunette, defiant, half-lit on the right side, with her hands completely transformed into laurel tree branches; the rightmost panel shows Daphne with red hair, gasping, but having escaped her ill-fated metamorphoses as she falls away from the laurel tree that is separate from her body. The framing of each piece creates a focus on Daphne, where previous renditions of the story focus on Daphne in relation to Apollo, Mockrin’s version depicts Daphne with Apollo in relation to her. Mockrin uses the traditional technique of grisaille painting and starts with a dark blue underpainting that mimics the blue paper Venetian Renaissance artists used. Although working with traditional stories and techniques, Mockrin’s painting stands as uniquely modern. Her oil paintings, including the triptych, have an airbrushed and smooth appearance, where brush strokes cannot be deciphered. Paired with the stylistic choice of leaving her paintings unvarnished, to create a flat matte look, her paintings could not be mistaken as historical works. 

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The nature of Greek mythology as a storytelling form invites multiple renditions, the version of this particular myth is most well known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Apollo and Cupid (Eros) debate who holsters the bow and arrow more effectively. To prove the accuracy and power of his aim, Cupid shoots Apollo and Daphne with his arrows: Apollo with the arrow of love, and Daphne the arrow of repulsion. Apollo’s unrequited love does not stop his advances. In his pursuit he claims that “in flight, she was yet more beautiful”, drawing comparison to the way a “gallic hound sees a hare…and pursues its prey”, creating an underlying the tone of sexual violence. Daphne cries for help, begging her father to “destroy my beauty which has proved too attractive”. Peneus transforms her into a laurel tree to save her from Apollo’s unwelcome advances. However, this does not break Apollo’s love spell, rather he embraces Daphne’s branches as if they were human limbs, kissing the wood, and declares that “you shall be my tree. Always you shall / wreathe my hair, my lyre, my quiver”. Daphne, eternalized as a laurel tree disappears and “only her beauty remains”, the beauty she desperately begged her father to destroy, but it is all that is left of her. In Daphne Pursued by Apollo (2020), Stid ruminates on Peneus’ role in the myth: “I am interested in the father-god who could not stop / the rape but could turn his daughter into a tree– / what kind of power is that / and why does it still river through our / world?”. Stid questions why Peneus could not stop the act of male violence, but had the power to meta morphose his daughter. The act of turning Daphne into a laurel tree appeases the Freudian castration anxiety complex, where the woman is no longer the threatening image of the castrated man. Daphne forgoes a physical objectification where all that remains is her beauty, inviting the male gaze to rest upon her with ease. 

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Sigmund Freud revisits, reinterprets, and reapplies his theory of castration anxiety throughout his body of work. The castration complex is the theory that the man fears women because she is the image of the castrated man, her lack of penis reminding the man of the threat of castration: “If a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger…In later life a grown man may perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will ensue”. The looming presence of castration anxiety persists through the man's life. This paper is not a criticism of the Freudian theory of castration anxiety, that paints the female reproductive organs as inferior to the phallus, that rebuttal has been made by feminist scholars such as Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, amongst others. Rather, the preference of the male phallus is representative of patriarchal frameworks interwoven into our society that preserve and encourage the male gaze, over the protection of women from the gaze. This paper serves as an application of Freudian theory more broadly, where the male gaze is the phallus being threatened through the recentering of traditionally male-centric myth and narrative. Through the close study of Apollo and Daphne’s myth in conversation with Mockrin’s visual reimagining, Apollo and Daphne represent the metaphorical castration of the male gaze through the reclamation of women’s body autonomy, stories, and voice in art. Therefore, the preservation of patriarchal frameworks are being threatened by the increased visibility for the protection of women from the gaze. Mockrin’s triptych A story told this many times becomes the forest (2025) works to castrate the male gaze.

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Apollo’s arm appears disembodied in each panel of the triptych, echoing Daphne’s loss of body autonomy in Ovid’s original myth; By reframing the narrative, the triptych begins to return autonomy to Daphne. In the original myth Daphne becomes a symbol of Apollo’s identity: the laurel. After she metamorphoses, Daphne's beauty is eternalized as a symbol of Apollo, her abuser. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey deconstructs the pleasure that comes from viewing women where, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic spectacle”. Mulvey states that women are set up in society to be displayed as spectacle, where taking pleasure in viewing her is invited, which is referred to as her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. When the women’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ is increased, the castration threat to the male gaze is decreased. Daphne’s transformation resulted in her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ to be increased, where she goes through the process of physically turning into an object. Adorning Apollo’s head as a laurel wreath, Daphne does not pose any threat of castration to Apollo, or more broadly, the male gaze. Mockrin reverses the role of Daphne as object and Apollo as objectifier in her triptych. Although the paintings still tell the original story where we can see Daphne in each rendition of the three panels transforming into the laurel tree, the focus changes: Apollo becomes a symbol of Daphne’s narrative, diminished to a protruding, predatory arm. All that is left of Apollo is his act of violence, the arm symbolizing male violence and detaching him from his own personhood. Mockrin’s reversal calls for visibility of the sheer amount of stories depicting male violence towards women in myth, and Baroque art alike, which is Echo’s, the body of work the triptych belongs to, overarching goal. The visibility created calls for accountability, which is what Mockrin is achieving through the recentering of these narratives. 

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Apollo’s disembodied arm represents a metaphorical castration, where the limb mirrors the castrated phallus. His arm symbolizes male aggression and sexual violence, standing in for the penis. Freud notes the “narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that particular organ”. The phallus, according to Freud, is the locus of male sexual drive and identity formation, therefore castration threatens the loss of the man’s identity completely. The arms in A story told this many times becomes the forest are the weapons of sexual assault, symbolizing the same locus the phallus provides for the sexual drive and identity formation. Therefore, the arms can be seen as an adequate representation of the phallus. Mockrin’s act of cropping out the rest of Apollo’s body is a castration where the man’s worst fear comes to fruition. By disembodying the arm, the power is taken away from phallus and the arm is worth the same as the castrated phallus: nothing.

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The repetition of Daphne, the image of the castrated man, with the castrated phallus,  Apollo’s arm, three times, dismantles her objectification, where Daphne starts to reclaim her narrative, voice, and body in each repetition. Shown through the facial expressions and body language of the three women depicted. Beginning with the leftmost panel: the blonde depiction of Daphne’s brow is furrowed as she looks up at what would be her attacker’s face, her body turned away from him as he pulls on her right shoulder. Her expression is worried and scared, as her fingertips begin to sprout laurel leaves. The leaves behind the left side of her head mimic a laurel wreath, foreshadowing her fate. In the middle panel, the brunette depiction of Daphne, wears a defiant expression, her metamorphoses further along, where her hands are now branches of the tree. Her body is turned away from her attacker, her gaze on his arm that is holding only her hair. This version of Daphne has control over her body, she is actively pulling away with strength, whereas the two other renditions' body actions are out of their control. In the middle panel Daphne is reclaiming her autonomy. The rightmost panel, with the depiction of Daphne with red hair is a defiant figure. Her expression appears surprised, she is falling backwards with the hand on her left shoulder, however she is not facing the arm or body of Apollo: she is gazing the other way where she is falling and actively pushing away the laurel leaves, they are not growing from her. In this final panel of the triptych the castration of Apollo, shown by the dismembered arm, coupled with the repetition has allowed Daphne to break free of her objectification. The castration can be viewed more theoretically, as a dismantling of the male gaze. The repetition of the phallus with the image of the castrated man, Daphne, shatters the pleasure from looking upon female beauty: Daphne escaped her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. The male gaze is threatened, because the triptych evokes the castration complex, threatening the phallus by showing the castrated man and the object of castration in the same image, not only once, but three times. 

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A story told this many times becomes the forest (2025) reimagines the myth of Apollo and Daphne through a Freudian lens to dismantle the structures of the male gaze and reclaim female autonomy within art. Through her dismemberment of Apollo’s body, repetition of Daphne’s image, and reversal of their traditional roles, Mockrin castrates the symbolic power of the phallus and subverts the patriarchal gaze that has long dominated mythological and artistic narratives. Her work exposes the violence and objectification embedded in canonical stories, transforming them into a space where women are no longer passive subjects of beauty but active figures reclaiming their narratives. In today’s cultural landscape Mockrin’s work feels urgent, where questions of consent, agency, and representation continue to shape discourse. By recentering Daphne’s story Mockrin reclaims the myth while asking contemporary viewers to rethink the damaging presence of the male gaze that echoes through art and society.

Bibliography

 

Art Gallery of Ontario. “Jesse Mockrin: Echo.” Last modified 2025.

 

Art Gallery of Ontario. Jesse Mockrin Echo. Edited by Adam Harris Levine. New York: Delmonico Books, 2025. 

 

Butler, Judith, “Gender Trouble.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 2375–2377. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

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Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 816–820. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Mockrin, Jesse, A story told this many times becomes the forest, 2025, Oil on linen triptych, Collection of Mark and Louise Nelson, Sydney, Australia. https://jessemockrin.com/Paintings-2025-1.

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Morford, Mark, Lenardon, Robert, Sham, Michael. Classical Mythology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 1952–1965. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

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Stid, Sophia. “Daphne Pursued by Apollo.” Poetry Daily. Posted December 6, 2020. https://poems.com/poem/daphne-pursued-by-apollo/.

“Cupid.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Last modified 2025. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cupid.