Isla Hansen / Catalina Schliebener Muñoz / Marvin Touré

Mattress Factory celebrates the opening of three new and distinct exhibitions at the museum’s 1414 Monterey galleries from artists Isla Hansen, Marvin Touré, and Catalina Schliebener Muñoz. These three artists were selected for exhibition by Guest Curator, Monique Long, a New York City-based contemporary art curator and writer through Mattress Factory’s Regional Open Call.  

About the exhibitions  
The Regional Open Call connects artists in our community with curators, creatives, institutions, and scholars throughout the world and is an ongoing effort to amplify the voices and profiles of artists from in and around Pittsburgh. Selected artists develop their exhibitions in concert with Mattress Factory staff, the Guest Curator, and in conversation with one another. 

Monique Long served as the Guest Curator for Mattress Factory’s Regional Open Call. The museum accepted entries from artists within 75 miles of Pittsburgh, and Long then selected several candidates for in-person studio visits. From these studio visits Hansen and Touré were chosen to develop projects with Mattress Factory. In addition, Long invited Schliebener Muñoz, a New York City based artist to exhibit alongside Hansen and Touré.

Isla Hansen: How to Get to Make Believe 
Isla Hansen is an artist/educator who invites audiences of all ages to rediscover the value and role of play in their lives. Leveraging tactile materials, soft sculpture, puppetry, set design, and bright colors—Hansen draws inspiration from Mister Rogers’ wildly successful children’s program, recorded in Pittsburgh and broadcast throughout the world. The importance of “make-believe” is underscored by the exhibition’s spatial duality: a “real” space, the set of a talk show prepped for recording interviews between a puppet host, “Ratlet”, and real people; and an “imaginary” space, a landscape made of hand built furniture-turned-puppet-theaters created for the show’s many characters, which include puppets of a mountain, bat, goats, and pig. Hansen’s world-making of characters and narratives catalyzes the power of pretend to reimagine the challenges of our realities. 

Catalina Schliebener Muñoz: Deep, Deep Woods 
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz is a queer Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist whose work draws on images, objects, and narratives associated with childhood to question norms of gender, sexuality, and class. Born out of the artist’s research into the life and artworks of Greer Lankton—a trans femme artist whose works are archived at Mattress Factory—their solo exhibition Deep, Deep Woods invites audiences to consider the complex histories and ongoing realities of LGBTIQA+ artists and communities. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, seriousness and play, Schliebener Muñoz interweaves their personal history with Greer Lankton’s archives and iconic American characters. Their full-room installation incorporates the characters of Raggedy Ann and Andy, and subtly evokes Alice Through the Looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz to create a fantasy space filled with multilayered collages, oversized doll parts, large-scale murals, pieces of Lankton’s archive, and their own teenage drawings. More than an homage to Lankton, Deep, Deep Woods is a dialogue between two artists across time and space, and is an exploration of shared experiences of the trans body; questions of self-identity; and the power of imagination to make new worlds.

Marvin Touré: the blood is the water.
Marvin Touré  is an Ivorian-American  artist who engages themes of love, loss, and memory through his interdisciplinary practice. Marvin’s exhibition, the blood is the water., utilizes black resin, cast plaster vessels, and coated fibers. The molded structures form multivarious pipes that serve as a visual and metaphorical exploration of connections—between familial memory, inheritance, generational storytelling, and archival networks. Elements of this work are engulfed in a unique mix of reds and oranges referencing the soil of Côte d’Ivoire. With a high-gloss black floor treated with resin beneath and surrounding walls tinted to the tones of red Georgia clay, Touré invites visitors to examine the material of memory and the grounds on which their familial narratives stand.