"Brooklyn-based artist Maud Madsen delves into what it means to find comfort, inspiration, and security in our domestic spaces. Her current solo exhibition, Dweller at Half Gallery, taps into the vast realm of memory as she depicts herself engaged in activities like building forts in the snow or pillow forts from couch cushions-things we often associate with kids' unbridled creativity and ingenuity. They are also shelters."
"Evocative of children's book author Chris Van Allsburg's dramatic and mysterious illustrations in acclaimed titles like Jumanji, Polar Express, and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Madsen often centers the living room or bedroom-places that define relaxation and dreaming-as places where voyages of the imagination take place. For Madsen, a similar approach shapes her renditions of childhood activities that highlight nostalgic and engrossing activities like building blanket forts or playing with a 1980s-era Fisher Price farm set."
Madsen stages childhood activities—building snow forts, pillow and blanket forts, and playing with a 1980s-era Fisher Price farm set—as both playful inventions and shelters. Her oil paintings employ deep shadows, enigmatic night settings, and uncanny compositions to suggest dreams or insomnia-driven reveries. Living rooms and bedrooms function as portals for voyages of the imagination, echoing dramatic, mysterious illustration traditions. The title Dweller evokes dwelling on the past and the inhabited spaces that figures create. Nighttime lighting and nesting motifs emphasize transitions, comfort, autonomy, and curated domestic security amid nostalgia and introspection.
Read at Colossal
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]