Portia Munson draws connections between the things we collect and what they say about us. The self-described feminist environmental artist creates fantastical installations from found materials that lure visitors with nostalgia, enveloping them in a visual cacophony of objects.
This path of exploration started early on. Like many teens, Munson found herself gravitating to all things pink. ‘It was so clear then that the color pink was very passive and very female-identified,’ she remembers. ‘I asked myself why I was being associated with this color and these objects.’ With this inquiry, Munson began to critically examine how color is used as a tool to influence the subconscious.
Munson studied painting at Cooper Union in the 1980s. She looked up to artists like Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, and Martha Rosler who fused art with social commentary. While developing her practice, she gravitated towards found objects, combining them into large-scale, often monochromatic compositions that probe how social norms are enforced through consumerism. As she collected castoffs found in yard sales and flea markets, she started to take note of what people treasure, collect, and discard. Her ‘Pink Project’ installation series began in the mid-1990s. It features pink ephemera – beauty products, jewelry, children’s toys, and kitchen items – floating atop waves of silk, satin, and chiffon fabric. Subsequent installations include Reflecting Pool (2013) and Flood (2018), which are made of blue plastic and draw links between mass consumerism and environmental peril.
In her second showing at Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians sector, Munson deploys a more nuanced approach that is no less impactful. Eschewing the sprawling immersive installation format, she opts instead for a denser free-standing display of bound objects and themes tethered together in physical and metaphorical proximity. Her ‘Bound Angel’ series was born out of work Munson created in Portland for her ‘Flood’ installations. While searching for objects, she noticed numerous discarded porcelain angels rendered into lamps and other household decor. ‘To me they had a very suffocating, instructional aspect to them,’ she says, referring to the virtues of chastity and morality encoded within the items designed to narrowly define beauty and acceptance. ‘They were Caucasian, young, “pretty”...there was something about them that seemed sinister, as if they represented the ideal.’ Munson was particularly drawn to the electrical cords winding around the base of the lamps and mimicked that sense of constriction in a series of tabletop installations that combined figurines with objects bound together with string and rope.
Bound Angel (2021), presented by New York’s P·P·O·W gallery, is a key piece in this series. It features a large table covered with a tablecloth made from wedding gowns and topped with the trussed torso of a mannequin surrounded by a series of smaller bound assemblages that symbolize the relationship between the female psyche and its external influences. ‘She’s filled with all of this information, and these constraints that we start accumulating in our unconscious,’ the artist says of the work. Within this tableau are items intentionally bound together to mimic polarized, outmoded, and damaging perceptions of femininity, the most legible being the Madonna-Whore complex. The presence of these objects also implicates the viewer, tying them to the subconscious coding they continue to receive – and reinforce through the items they choose to hold close.