Catherine Mulligan unveils her haunting new exhibition, and gives us a lesson on how to turn tragic imagery into a tool for empowerment.
Catherine Mulligan photographed by Ben Taylor.in Tribeca, and the artist—unlike the grotesquely candid subjects in her work—is feeling a little shy. Since finishing her MFA at Indiana University Bloomington in 2019, Mulligan has been quietly accumulating a fan base for her eerie oil paintings featuring hyper-feminine zombified women and abandoned buildings that embody both a refuge and refusal of Y2K-era cultural malaise.
MULLIGAN: Not really. I was kind of a weirdo. But I feel like it totally influenced me. A lot of my work is about taste politics. My parents were very tasteful, educated people b MULLIGAN: I can only see that through the lens of being a very alienated teenager. Those clothes were never going to look right on me, and I feel like there’s something in that aesthetic that’s just gross. It kind of contains that alienation.MULLIGAN: It might be very subjective. But I feel like it’s this sort of abject space where things aren’t really vintage, they’re just recently discarded and they haven’t really been properly reappraised.SCARABELLI: But it’s not really.
MULLIGAN: People have commented when someone’s posted my work online, but I really don’t think it’s misogynistic. I don’t think the only way to be feminist is to make women look beautiful.MULLIGAN: You have to let art surprise you, and you can’t get to that place if you’re self-centering from the beginning.MULLIGAN: To me, they are kind of feminist. They have agency. They’re staring at you. They’re threatening.Sisters, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Tara Downs, New York.
SCARABELLI: Oh, yeah. I saw the mood board in the book that you’re publishing with the exhibition, we should pull that up. We have Donatella Versace. We’ve got a young Ariana Grande. What’s this?
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