Catalina Schliebener Muñoz’s Subversive Playhouse

Satan is alive and well, incarnate in the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls of Catalina Schliebener Muñoz. Hail Satan (or, at least, his proxy). Employing a cheerfully maximalist palette not typically associated with representations of demonic pandemonium, Schliebener Muñoz continues their longstanding exploration of our societal anxieties around childhood. At the Mattress Factory, they have constructed an irreverent shrine to childhood inspired by their own upbringing; the American Right’s panic over ‘grooming’ (heir to the 1980s and ’90s Satanic panic, a conspiracy theory about Satanic ritual abuse); and US artist Greer Lankton’s archive, part of which is housed in the museum. Schliebener Muñoz’s titular installation, Deep, Deep Woods (2024), features a miscellany of plastic toys, childhood drawings, Raggedy Andy wall art, paintings with protruding jump ropes and phallic soft sculptures, all in bright pink and red hues. Sculptural elements abound, from lost mittens and plastic flowers to picket fences and miniature hide-aways. Every nook and cranny contains something.

Two oversized, elongated, candy-striped legs with black shoes take up nearly the full length of the gallery, recalling the corpse of the Wicked Witch of the East from the 1939 film adaptation of Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Such fun, twisted takes on fairy tales are the Chilean-born, New York-based artist’s specialty. They often remix Disney films to viciously deconstruct ideas of childhood, race, gender and colonialism. Polymorphous orgies recur. The participants here are intermittently headless Raggedy Ann dolls, which sometimes merge into one another. Accompanied by bold, graphic outlines of lassos, the smiling dolls doodle, play and mutate across red walls. The lack of a boundary between the Anns and the Andys is the point; the gender of a child is wild territory.

On a single wall, sketches from the museum’s Greer Lankton Collection are interspersed with Schliebener Muñoz’s juvenile drawings. Both artists tap into childhood’s grotesque joys to undermine prevailing ideas of purity and innocence. Schliebener Muñoz plays on the multi-directional desire found in children: the kind of feelings that percolate before adults fully impose their righteousness upon youth. But sex isn’t the opposite of innocence; the guilt we lay upon it is.

Toys can be sexy. That’s one of the secrets of childhood. Desire isn’t something that can be neatly compartmentalized. The soft fabric sculptures erupt from small, patterned canvases like phalli and jump ropes ooze out of sock puppets’ mouths. One sculpture’s long, soft knob is even pickled a darker pink. Schliebener Muñoz’s talent lies in eroding the space between bodies with bitingly whimsical charm. Recalling the interlacing orgies of Keith Haring’s paintings, Schliebener Muñoz’s wall drawings intertwine lassos, limbs, butts and faces. Their playhouse is littered with depictions of joyful Raggedy Anns and Andys sewing one another up and hiding under stools. This multimedia collage approach permeates the entire exhibition. Bric-à-brac adorn side tables like talismans. Even the rugs smile back at you like demonic Ronald McDonald clowns.

The show’s porous borders and boundaries raise questions by scrambling notions of pleasure and pain, purity and impropriety, safety and wilderness. Why are all these mittens and shoes abandoned behind a fence? Why is a miniature attic needed? Whose photographs are hidden inside? Beware: abandoned dolls harbour their own grudges, and kids are not merely puppets bending to adults’ every whim. Like Lankton, Schliebener Muñoz mines the ephemera of childhood creativity, bundling together blue and pink toys to problematize characterizations of gender as innate. The artist has created a symphony of childhood colour and delight; any fear you bring to the exhibit is your own.

Catalina Schliebener Muñoz's ‘Deep, Deep Woods’ is on view at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, until 30 March 2025

^{Main image: Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, ‘Deep, Deep Woods’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; photography: Tom Little}