Murmurations: Cyrilla Mozenter, Solo Exhibition
Cyrilla Mozenter is known for her gouache-painted, pencil-drawn (and written) works on paper and hand stitched industrial wool felt freestanding and wall pieces that include the transplantation of cutout letters, letter-derived and pictogram-like shapes. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, her work is in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Murmurations
For many years I was a frequent visitor/viewer of the nine Pre-Columbian Peruvian Feathered Panels mounted on a glass-enclosed wall in the Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum. They are dense geometric arrangements of thousands upon thousands of brilliant yellow and turquoise macaw feathers adhered to cotton fabric. Each elongated horizontal panel is seven feet wide and displayed end-to-end and top edge to bottom to form a continuous, bristling field. Serving a ceremonial/sacred function, they convey a sumptuous and penetrating visceral beauty. Because of the vividness of the color, given their age, the slaughter of the birds, whose feathers we witness, remains freshly present.
Like feathers, the wool felt and silk thread that I use in my work, derive from living creatures. Wool and silk, though, are more benignly collected, and their array of beautiful colors, in both cases, are the result of dyes. A recent visitor to my studio likened the pair of triangles protruding from the (almost always) left edge of each wool felt banner in my current series to bird beaks, as she mimed chattering with the fingers of both hands. I told her about the feathered panels and she suggested I had given the long-ago massacred macaws a voice, if however silent.
Cyrilla Mozenter, 2021
For many years I was a frequent visitor/viewer of the nine Pre-Columbian Peruvian Feathered Panels mounted on a glass-enclosed wall in the Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum. They are dense geometric arrangements of thousands upon thousands of brilliant yellow and turquoise macaw feathers adhered to cotton fabric. Each elongated horizontal panel is seven feet wide and displayed end-to-end and top edge to bottom to form a continuous, bristling field. Serving a ceremonial/sacred function, they convey a sumptuous and penetrating visceral beauty. Because of the vividness of the color, given their age, the slaughter of the birds, whose feathers we witness, remains freshly present.
Like feathers, the wool felt and silk thread that I use in my work, derive from living creatures. Wool and silk, though, are more benignly collected, and their array of beautiful colors, in both cases, are the result of dyes. A recent visitor to my studio likened the pair of triangles protruding from the (almost always) left edge of each wool felt banner in my current series to bird beaks, as she mimed chattering with the fingers of both hands. I told her about the feathered panels and she suggested I had given the long-ago massacred macaws a voice, if however silent.
Cyrilla Mozenter, 2021
a uniform hieroglyphic, Groups 1 to 11, 2020-2021
Industrial wool felt hand stitched with silk thread.
Each unit 10” x 38"
