A Reckoning in Pink | Danielle Mužina
February 17 - March 18, 2023
Artist Statement:
A RECKONING IN PINK envisions heightened parallel worlds in which women reckon with personal and communal agency amidst crisis and uncertainty. The paintings ask questions about the impact of gender performance and trauma on relationships, selfhood, and experiences of space, supported by the amplified intensity permitted within an apocalyptic setting. My immigrant grandmother, reflecting on witnessing national crises in our home of former Yugoslavia, tells me “to pay attention when the sky’s bleeding even if someone tells you it’s not.” These paintings grapple with the roles figures play actively or inactively, together or divided, in both contributing to and addressing internal and external crises.
In 2019, Dr. Blasey-Ford's courageous testimony fueled my bravery in examining my feelings and dreams as a survivor during the #MeToo movement without self-censure. Since then, I have been painting images of women and nonbinary characters interfacing with ambiguous social, bodily, and environmental happenings as a metaphor for the ways we navigate our tenuous contemporary moment. In this series, the sky is often in the process of turning an unnatural shade of pink, and characters reveal ominous magenta wounds. Figures in the paintings react to the apocalyptic turn of events by preparing themselves for wanted or unwanted changes, real or imagined threats, and sufficient or insufficient resolutions in an uncertain future. Within and between groups in my paintings, responses to environmental forces vary, creating either tension or solidarity. Characters gather as groups for rebellion or defense, plot mysterious forms of vigilante justice, prepare to fight or flee, or pick up the pieces together after a cataclysm. Some figures seem to be healing from wounds, while others are curious about harnessing apocalyptic magic. Some even heed Mitski’s advice to “Be The Cowboy” and search the land for answers & threats, as others surrender to a new normal, cigarette in hand, as events unfold.
The environments in my paintings are densely layered, using visual patterns to reference cyclical patterns of thought and normative behavior that are laced into our perceived realities. These patterns are interwoven with direct and indirect social pressures, impacting both body and mind. Some of these pressures are also embodied by multiple versions of my self-portrait, who behave as different characters in order to reference my felt and changing relationships between gender and place as a queer woman and survivor. I believe we all deserve the agency choose a fluid relationship to gender that shifts to our needs and moods, and the empowerment to be critical, brave, and inventive in the face of oncoming threats.
While gender can be a space of play, joy, and self-discovery, the rigidity of many traditional gender expectations can be suffocating, and breed an intensity to choose between conflict or survival. In my experiences living with complex PTSD as a survivor, overperforming norms for my assigned gender often feels correlated with the self-effacing “fawn response” to acute stress, or to narratives from my Catholic upbringing about the relationship between suffering and saintliness for women. As it’s difficult to unpack decades of performing gender and internalizing misogyny, I find myself negotiating conflicts regarding my gender performance and authentic voice as I move through and react to the world around me - just as my self-portraits are in the paintings. Sometimes, imminent destruction feels certain, and other times, I get closer to finding some sort of understanding or collaborative power. The paintings create space for this to occur as these women struggle to problem-solve, collaborate and adapt in turbulent environments.
Use (or click) the QR code below to link to my artist websites, the exhibition Spotify playlist, an Adrienne Rich poem, and the #MeToo movement’s action toolkits.
A RECKONING IN PINK envisions heightened parallel worlds in which women reckon with personal and communal agency amidst crisis and uncertainty. The paintings ask questions about the impact of gender performance and trauma on relationships, selfhood, and experiences of space, supported by the amplified intensity permitted within an apocalyptic setting. My immigrant grandmother, reflecting on witnessing national crises in our home of former Yugoslavia, tells me “to pay attention when the sky’s bleeding even if someone tells you it’s not.” These paintings grapple with the roles figures play actively or inactively, together or divided, in both contributing to and addressing internal and external crises.
In 2019, Dr. Blasey-Ford's courageous testimony fueled my bravery in examining my feelings and dreams as a survivor during the #MeToo movement without self-censure. Since then, I have been painting images of women and nonbinary characters interfacing with ambiguous social, bodily, and environmental happenings as a metaphor for the ways we navigate our tenuous contemporary moment. In this series, the sky is often in the process of turning an unnatural shade of pink, and characters reveal ominous magenta wounds. Figures in the paintings react to the apocalyptic turn of events by preparing themselves for wanted or unwanted changes, real or imagined threats, and sufficient or insufficient resolutions in an uncertain future. Within and between groups in my paintings, responses to environmental forces vary, creating either tension or solidarity. Characters gather as groups for rebellion or defense, plot mysterious forms of vigilante justice, prepare to fight or flee, or pick up the pieces together after a cataclysm. Some figures seem to be healing from wounds, while others are curious about harnessing apocalyptic magic. Some even heed Mitski’s advice to “Be The Cowboy” and search the land for answers & threats, as others surrender to a new normal, cigarette in hand, as events unfold.
The environments in my paintings are densely layered, using visual patterns to reference cyclical patterns of thought and normative behavior that are laced into our perceived realities. These patterns are interwoven with direct and indirect social pressures, impacting both body and mind. Some of these pressures are also embodied by multiple versions of my self-portrait, who behave as different characters in order to reference my felt and changing relationships between gender and place as a queer woman and survivor. I believe we all deserve the agency choose a fluid relationship to gender that shifts to our needs and moods, and the empowerment to be critical, brave, and inventive in the face of oncoming threats.
While gender can be a space of play, joy, and self-discovery, the rigidity of many traditional gender expectations can be suffocating, and breed an intensity to choose between conflict or survival. In my experiences living with complex PTSD as a survivor, overperforming norms for my assigned gender often feels correlated with the self-effacing “fawn response” to acute stress, or to narratives from my Catholic upbringing about the relationship between suffering and saintliness for women. As it’s difficult to unpack decades of performing gender and internalizing misogyny, I find myself negotiating conflicts regarding my gender performance and authentic voice as I move through and react to the world around me - just as my self-portraits are in the paintings. Sometimes, imminent destruction feels certain, and other times, I get closer to finding some sort of understanding or collaborative power. The paintings create space for this to occur as these women struggle to problem-solve, collaborate and adapt in turbulent environments.
Use (or click) the QR code below to link to my artist websites, the exhibition Spotify playlist, an Adrienne Rich poem, and the #MeToo movement’s action toolkits.
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Artist Bio:
Danielle Mužina is an artist and educator from Cleveland, Ohio. As an artist, she makes paintings that explore place, identity and crisis, inspired by her experiences as a member of a family that immigrated from Croatia. She received her B.F.A at Ohio Wesleyan University, her M.A. at Eastern Illinois University, and her M.F.A. at Miami University. Mužina has studied at the Jerusalem Studio School in Civita Castellana, Italy, and completed residencies at Chautauqua School of Art, the Vermont Studio Center, and The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. Her paintings have been shown at numerous galleries nationally including juried exhibitions at First Street Gallery, Blue Mountain Gallery, Bowery Gallery, The Untitled Space, and Prince Street Gallery in New York, NY, Woskob Family Gallery in State College, PA, the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, GA, and Verum Ultimum Gallery in Portland, OR. Her current series was recognized with an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the national scholarly organization SECAC’s Outstanding Artistic Achievement Award in 2021, and has been exhibited multiple times nationally in the past three years. She is looking forward to being included in John Seed’s upcoming book Disrupted Realism: More Disruption. Mužina recently pivoted from her position as Assistant Professor of Painting & head of painting at Murray State University, where she was recognized with her institution's Emerging Scholar Award in 2019, Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021, and Board of Regents Teaching Excellence Award in 2022. The opportunities for leadership and activism that professorship offered Mužina inspired her to co-found reframe52, a women-owned DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) education company. The reframe52 program is launching this calendar year. Mužina currently lives and works in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio as a proud rust-belter, amateur mixologist, aspiring drag king, and dog mother to a petulant Morkie named Gatsby. |
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