Artist muses on ‘Reckless Meditations’
Suzette Mouchaty installed colorful banners and an assemblage made with a tickettaking device near the entrance to her GSpot Contemporary Gallery exhibition to capture her sense of the present as a carnival of madness.
“I just thought, we’ve been living in a circus; why not let (the show) be a circus?” she said.
Mouchaty holds a Ph.D. in genetics and teaches biology at the University of HoustonDowntown. She came to art late, during a “past-midlife crisis,” as she put it. She lost a husband to cancer, after years of dealing with his severe mental illness.
“Everything in my life was just not right,” she said. “I spent a year trying to figure out what I’m doing with myself … I’ve gone through quite a revolution.”
She earned her master’s at University of Houston in interdisciplinary practices and emerging forms in 2018. “Reckless Meditations” is her first solo gallery show.
What isn’t reckless is Mouchaty’s history as a scientist. While the show at first seems a bit all over the map, it becomes apparent that she’s game for any material and learning as she goes. Her morbid sense of humor, which can be laugh-out-loud funny, holds things together.
She has turned a box full of stainless-steel speculums — the duck bill-shaped devices gynecologists use in the examination room — into a flock of birds that’s perched on faux branches and fences around the room. If they had sound, they’d be squawking. When a friend gave her a box of the speculums at the height of the #MeToo movement, they “spoke” to her like chattering grackles, Mouchaty said. One she calls “Ruby Lipped Misogynist Mocker.” Another she identifies as the “North American Long-Billed Hypocrite Chider.” She was just responding to “everything that happened during the pandemic,” Mouchaty said, but she appreciates that the bird-speculums are now even more acutely timely.
She also incorporates tiny slides of brain cross sections from MRIs into a number of works, adhering them to small glass discs that she inserts into objects with rechargeable lights. They can be employed to funny or deadly serious means. One MRI “bead” forms the head of a whimsical, alien soft-toy doll titled “The Daily Angst.” Another — a scan whose white halo-like effect indicates hypoxia (brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen) — is crudely taped to a square of pink plexiglass as a memorial to George Floyd. Mouchaty also embeds baubles into small sculptures that could be spiritual tools, including a dagger and an ankh (the ancient Egyptian “key of life”). The show’s title work resembles an MRI machine. Peering through its cylinder, viewers see a constellation of brain scans.
The slides were hard for Mouchaty to work with because they are inherently sad. Most of the people they represent would have died from the injuries depicted, she said. By late 2020, she knew far too many people who had suddenly lost loved ones. And her housemate’s sister died of inoperable brain cancer.
A pair of psychedelic wax pencil drawings, inspired by Karl Wirsum’s 1968 painting “Screamin J Hawkins,” ties the brain images and gynecological references together: The titles of “Cogito I” and “Cogito IV” refer to the ancient philosophical principle, “I think, therefore I am.” They radiate all kinds of thought: Are they brains? Vaginas? Floral anatomy? However one reads them, they are indeed a scream.