MMoCA Newsletter, Summer 2016

EXHIBITIONS
CLAIRE STIGLIANI:
HALF-SICK OF SHADOWS
May 28 through September 3, 2016
2
In her first solo museum exhibition, mixed-media artist
Claire Stigliani presents her most recent body of work in
which she transforms two-dimensional drawings and paintings
into miniature puppet sets and video-based vignettes.
On view in the museum’s State Street Gallery from May 28
through September 3, Claire Stigliani: Half-Sick of Shadows
features five of the artist’s semi-autobiographical series
that combine her real life anxieties with fictional stories,
and probe more deeply into the psychological longing
and latent sexuality that underpin her artistic practice. For
this exhibition, the concurrent display of works on paper,
hand-constructed stage sets, and short movies reference
and reinforce each other to create layered and voyeuristic
scenes—mirrors reflecting and refracting the artist’s halfimagined
worlds.
Graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s
Masters of Fine Arts program in 2010, Stigliani has
since relocated to New York, producing works that merge
complex social and cultural references with a broad array
of art historical sources, including eighteenth-century
Rococo painting, Austrian portraits of royalty, fairytale
illustrations, and Pop art. She inserts a caricature of herself
into the fictional stories she represents, which range from
Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott to Angela Carter’s The Snow
Child. With skewed and condensed spaces, collapsed and
manipulated narratives, her paintings are dense compositions
of acrylic, colored pencil, wax, and gold leaf on paper.
They allow Stigliani to enter alternative realities and safely
navigate the uncertainties of, or transgress the expectations
surrounding, contemporary notions of feminine power,
desire, art, and love.
The suggestion of role-playing finds additional expression
in the accompanying puppet sets, which are very literal
three-dimensional renderings of her drawings. Physical
spaces decorated with to-scale scenery, the miniature sets
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, June 3
6–9 pm