Artist Bio:
Maggie Muehleman is a second-year MA/PhD student at the University of Mississippi. She earned her Bachelors of Arts from Transylvania University in Lexington Kentucky in 2021. Her interests currently include 19th-20th century American literature, gender and sexuality studies, female modernism, and anthropology. She lives and teaches the life philosophy that the job of any art is to make the strange familiar and familiar strange. As an artist, she works in ceramics, sculpture, and functional art focusing on themes of gender, the structures of daily life, and interrogating nostalgia.

Artist Statement:
This exhibition is about the feminine body and its proximity to ontologies of violence. Stigmata was the founding piece which calls into mind both the era of the minimalist industrial art movement as well as its more fleshy and feminine counterpart in the feminist art movement in the mid 20th century. Drawing the line between what does and does not count as violence–what does and does not count as flesh or the object of violence–is fraught with bodily and gendered politics. The two sculptures that make up Stigmata are modeled after a pair of earrings but blown up to an exaggerated-yet-corporeal scale which differ only in temporality. The installation therefore contemplates and complicates the agentive differential implied by the both self- and socially-inflicted injuries and slow-violences of ornamentation. 

The newer piece of this collection is Don’t Touch. The sculpture is certainly fleshy but defies exacting identification as a denoted body or part. Mimicking the idea of land art, the structure can be viewed as a prone feminine form melting into the land around her. Or not–you decide. Utilizing at least three of the senses, I’ve created the bench-like structure to lure the viewer in, to tempt the sensations all while instructing the opposite behavior in its title. In fact, the sculpture itself will tell whether or not its directive has been obeyed. The bench is upholstered in peach velvet fabric, the nap of which is more than capable of leaving evidence of defiance. As pleasing as the viewing sensation may be upon encounter, the discerning viewer may also begin to feel the violence that begins to tug at the corner of your eye.