Cyrilla Mozenter: The quieting of industrial material

Contributed by Michael Brennan / To my mind, the cultivation of art is mainly about making distinctions, and Cyrilla Mozenter’s solo show “Problems of Art” at 57W57 Arts hits that mark. She is essentially a sculptor – and a great one – in that she makes beautiful objects. Much as I admire her approach to volume, though, it’s her novel transformation of drawing into predominantly felt sculpture – decisive cuts made with sewing shears, silk whipstitching like super-sutures – that generates the greatest sense of adventure. This older charcoal drawing of Mozenter’s, not included in the exhibition, demonstrates her sensitivity to material, her witty pictographic interplay of image and text, and her spatial sense of solitude.

Mozenter is intimately aware of all the working properties of her industrial material, just as Richard Serra presumably knew all there was to know about the properties of steel. By her own accounting:

Felt is a textile of ancient origin made from matted and consolidated tangles of animal fur suggesting compressed chaos. Unlike the grid of woven, felt is the fabric of irrationality. An insulator, the felt I use is thick, dense, and quieting—soft to the touch, with a matte, impressionable, non-reflective surface. The silk thread with which I stitch, is lustrous, refined. Both materials derive from creatures.

While Joseph Beuys with his Tartar healing wraps and later Robert Morris with his folded vulvar sculptures also used felt, Mozenter has explored its possibilities – in particular, its “compressed chaos” – more deeply and personally, using a strictly hands-on approach and treating the material like a second succulent skin. Her artistic choices – starting with her baseline decision to grapple with a resistant and sometimes uncooperative material and extending to color, whipstitching, and cutting-as-drawing – are compelling. She can be purposefully informal with her formal tolerances: at times her sculptures bulge, awkwardly, buckling under their own weight. Often, as with the More saints seen grouping of vessels, they are hairy with untrimmed threads, and occasionally cattywampus. Some pieces, like No I like flags 19, appear to be remnants of end cuts. The totality of these seeming eccentricities fully animate Mozenter’s work.

She often uses animal forms in witty ways. The banner No I like flags 25 (creature/green) appears to include the silhouette of an unnamed animal, something like a llama. Mozenter has explored snow, and polar bears often figure in her work. Her interplay with animal images and text functions somewhat like Imagist poetry. Consider Denise Levertov’s poem “To the Reader,” itself a miniature arctic epic:

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,
and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

Mozenter is an estimable student of art history across cultures, conjoining that vocation with a forward-looking concern for the environment relevant to global warming and even Donald Trump’s musings about annexing of Greenland. She recently exhibited work at april, april in Pittsburgh with the Inuit artist Irene Avaalaaqiaq Tiktaalaaq, among others.

Mozenter establishes a solitary feeling, like the one you might have when exhaling on a freezing winter day on open tundra. Her dexterity with image and text within seemingly empty areas – her poetics of space – energizes her work, making it game and lively as well as enigmatic. For all its sparseness, there is joy in a woman’s silhouette embedded in the geographic footprint of Oklahoma, placed above a doorway like an exit sign.

Some of Mozenter’s signs and flags seem to be for an alternative country. She has a penchant for pennants, which, like the wooden ice cream spoons she sometimes deploys, seem to have fallen away from the general culture. When I was a boy, the ultimate minimalist sports statement was to have a nearly empty bedroom displaying just a single pennant. Mozenter’s pennants – proud, moody, moving, and cheering – tie into a comparably terse rallying verve.

The dozen or so works in this small survey capture Mozenter’s command of cloth, her wit, the lively interchange she renders among color, material, image, and text, and, overall, her profoundly distinctive sensibility.

“Cyrilla Mozenter: Problems of Art,” 57W57 Arts, 501 Fifth Avenue, Suite 701, New York, NY. Through February 28, 2025.

About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.