“Two Johns” was the visual articulation of a movie not yet made. The exhibition was a collaboration between two young artists, David Sampethai and Antonakis, who together wove an elaborate narrative that involves a vampire and a werepanther—the Two Johns—and their “sworn eternal enemy (Mr. Grin),” a tower and a pink mansion on the island of Naxos, and a series of “unexpected events.” The result was a show that introduced a narrative stitched together from set pieces, disconnected scenes, and character studies presented by two artists in very different ways.

The tale was told in the main gallery space through paintings and illustrations hung in a dense, salon-style spread across four walls, evocative of a storyboard. It started with a pairing of two works on one wall that exemplified the differences in each artist’s style. The first was Haunted House, 2015, Sampethai’s elaborate black-ink-on-paper drawing of a house viewed from behind a gate covered in foliage. Written at the bottom of the image are words that resemble the lyrics to a song, with lines such as WALKING THROUGH THE RUSTY GATE / YOU HEAR A WHISPER CALL YOUR NAME. The illustration is matched with a painting by Antonakis, Study of Kouros place (Mike just lost his tooth at the skate ramp), 2015, showing a kind of abstracted abode—a bed is in view, as is a hallway leading to a door—rendered in the delicate manner of early Matisse, with perfectly placed tones of teal, crimson, ocher, and black forming light color blocks and soft lines.

The tale moved from the childhood of the Two Johns, with mention of their favorite uncle, Count Condu (though “technically he wasn’t their uncle, more like a really, really distant old relative”), into a fantastical realm of flashback, observation, and current events, as the duo ended up on an island in a state of melancholy. Pop-culture references lend themselves to this nonlinear fable. Take Mr. Grin’s butler, “a painter who tries to piece . . . his human memories together,” who is rendered by Sampethai as a figure caught in the negative space of a black page; Sil is an old vampire with a penchant for the television series Game of Thrones. In another room, a backstory was created through character studies framed on a wall, with texts beneath each portrait describing the sitter, such as Slinky, an elderly vampire from Indonesia. These studies were presented alongside an elegant display case containing letters, notes, and location images, including photographs of the tower on Naxos and an image of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, with the head of a Canadian goose popping up from the bottom of the frame. In one sepia photograph, a man stands on a staircase that emerges from what seems to be a stage; accompanying notation identifies him as Count Condu. This is the last surviving photograph of him, apparently.

The exhibition sound track—a heady composition recalling Arthur Russell’s melancholic electronic instrumentals and Ariel Pink’s melodic sonic warps—was composed by Sampethai in collaboration with musicians Irene Lyssari and Niko Vezani (aka Benjha) as a takeoff on the music from the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91). As the viewer wove her way through this strange story composed of paintings, drawings, and notes, it became clear that the lyrics to the music—heard through headphones connected to the little mp3 player provided on entering the show—appear in many of the texts. The music completed what became a total sensory and spatial experience, adding yet another layer to the exhibition’s take on myth’s capacity for endless variation.

—Stephanie Bailey