Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Oona Brangam-Snell for NADA Miami 2021.

Across seven jacquard-woven and hand-embroidered canvases, Brangam-Snell builds layered scenes that distort universally popular symbols. Intrigued by how we individually interpret common imagery, she interrogates established visual conventions in her surreal compositions.

In several new works, Brangam-Snell quilts two textiles into a single piece, seaming more loosely woven foregrounds to dense background fabrics. This adds depth while concealing and omitting parts of each cloth. In Swan Lake, an open theater curtain is decorated with throngs of expectant faces, stacked like gargoyles around a swan alone on the open ocean. In Legends of Orlando, two stalks of asparagus – whose designs reference both science fiction robots and Polynesian totems – guard the exit to a mountain populated by bears holding hands. A third piece, Summer Night in Green Town, centers on a rain cloud that fills the ominous open maw of a shadowy Mardi Gras devil. In all these compositions, a benign nature scene is transformed by the one framing it, altering both the viewer’s perspective and the work’s tone.

In the other textiles presented here, Brangam-Snell plays up theatrical framing within a single layer of cloth and highlights foreground elements with hand embroidery. In Early Bird, an enormous rooster and worm burst into a quiet fairy-tale glade, their bulging embroidered bodies interrupting the flat surface of the jacquard forest. By contrast, Canaries in the Coalmine uses a claustrophobic wall of pebbles as the backdrop for startled birds, who swarm around a column in the silhouette of an hourglass as it slowly fills with stitched water droplets. The most dreamlike piece, Broadway Ballet, emphasizes tactility with humanoid figures who emerge covered in tufts of cotton from an embellished cave and gesture towards a receding landscape of dislocated shapes.

By combining symbols from heraldry and folk art with references to comic book ephemera, Brangam-Snell uses each to undercut the other and sets a tone that is both playfully ironic and tenderly serious. The hypnotic sanctity and superficial rhythms of these familiar images urge the viewer to question their tacit connections to them. Using the crisp color and gingerly balanced pattern language of interior furnishings, her work explores the tension of seeing something strange in a familiar context and wondering whether our responses are emotionally genuine or merely memorized.

Oona Brangam-Snell (b. 1989, New York City, NY) is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and works as a senior designer for the textile firm Maharam. Recent exhibitions include Nina Johnson, Miami, FL; Friedman Benda, New York, NY; Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA and Mrs., Maspeth, NY. Her work has been featured in Elephant Magazine, Artnet News, Artviewer, Artforum, T Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Architectural Digest Design. Brangam-Snell’s work is included in the collection of Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA and the X Museum, Beijing, China. Brangam-Snell lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.