Fantastic, surreal and entertaining. Sipping a refreshing white and standing betwixt a colourful collage of cosmopolitans at the Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination exhibit launch party, these are the sentiments that came to mind.

A band was playing that directed listeners who wished to talk to move their conversations to a distance so as not to distract the artists.  The crowd had succumbed to childlike reverie and these appeared adult words.

Since September 29 and running until January 2, 2013, the Glenbow Museum offers an exhibit that promises to take you back through the rabbit hole – so to speak. Become Alice for an afternoon, as the icons of childhood are recreated through a very somber, adult looking glass.

"This idea that the literature of the past can merge with an interest in the biological present and the future in order to help us understand who we are is really the foundation for this exhibition," says the exhibit’s Chief Curator Mark Scala of The Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.

Roughly 60 paintings, photographs, sculpture and video works by contemporary artists from Canada and across the globe compose this eclectic show, including works by the Chapman Brothers, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cindy Sherman and David Altmejd.

Altmejd, born in Montreal and based in New York, is represented at galleries internationally and known for his style of collaborating seemingly random materials – Stars of David, mirrors, faux jewels, severed werewolf heads, thread, seahorse – into striking sculptural pieces wrought with "symbolic potential".

Indeed symbolism is a theme present throughout the entire exhibit, as fairy tales and monsters are used to suggest the world’s future path.

"We all use our imaginations to conceive of things we might become, that we don’t have any other way of talking about in relationship to our body," Scala says. "When you think about genetic science, genetic engineers can create new types of bodies by splicing DNA. What would these types of body look like?"

"For some artists the bodies that we can create in the future actually seem to echo the images of animals and humans combined that we have seen in fairy tales or the composite monsters that we see in something like Frankenstein."

Scala says one of the first artists selected for this exhibit was Australian artist Patricia Piccinini for her piece "The Long Awaited", the sculpture of a young boy cuddling a large manatee-like grandmother figure on a bench. This so-true-to-life sculpture gives the eerie impression the young boy is actually breathing.

Piccinini, while interested in the genetic future, also uses images fanciful and appeasing to our childhood recollections.

"We’ve always been sort of fascinated, I think, by grotesquery throughout human history and so we want to turn away but at the same time we really want to look; we really want to understand what it is about these creatures – these repulsive scary looking creatures – that we find so compelling," Scala says.

Most interesting of all, he explains, is that monsters are our own creation. They exist because we invent them to symbolize the things we most fear.

How will you interpret the monsters lurking within the Glenbow? How will you relate now to the common characters of your youth as they are used to depict tomorrow’s peril?

Should confronting these beautiful demons be of interest haste not. The exhibit has made its final stop here in Calgary.

"The Winnipeg Art Gallery hosted the exhibit before us and it is not traveling on beyond us," says Ray Jense, manager of production and design at the Glenbow Museum. "All the works are being dispersed back to the private collections and galleries that own the work."

And back to haunting the inner child that happily we need still embrace to better understand what’s coming.