Tina Mion Delves Deep Into Family Trauma While Broadening Her Oeuvre at Kouri + Corrao Gallery
By Camille LeFevre | SWContemporary | August 13, 2024
Content warning: This review addresses suicide, gun violence, and childhood abuse.
No one is exempt. All earthly creatures are mortal, each existing moment to moment in exquisite balance between life and death. Most days, such thoughts go unconsidered. We have stuff to do, people to take care of, art to make. When Sedona-based artist Tina Mion is drawing, painting, or fabricating a sculpture, however, she’s acutely aware of the liminality in the day-to-day. Death is always foremost in her mind.
No wonder: born in Washington D.C. in 1960, Mion was four when her family moved into an abandoned mortuary in New Jersey. She has spoken of the place’s gruesomeness (things in jars, bloodstained curtains), as well as of the neglect and abuse she endured. During her childhood, her mother attempted suicide several times and was committed. Her brother, Russell, was sickly, often toddling around on his tiptoes in dirty pink footy pajamas, she told me. On his twelfth birthday, their stepfather gave Russell a gun, despite the boy’s mental instability and emotional outbursts. In 2018, the adult Russell suicided with a gun.
Mion’s work has often (not always) dealt with extreme, even triggering subject matter, perhaps mostly famously in her massive painting A New Year’s Party in Purgatory for Suicides (2004), which hangs in the library at La Posada, the Winslow, Arizona hotel she owns with her husband Allan Affeldt. The work features seventy-seven famous victims and people Mion has known—with herself painted in a corner. Mion’s posters and paintings of her wildly imaginative Spectacular Death Spoons are another example.
At once ghastly and hilarious, these and other Mion works juxtapose history, politics, and Mion’s lexicon of iconography (precariously balanced elephants, herself as a clown, frosted pink cakes, flaming candles, moths, paintbrushes, the dusty-pink to oceanic-azure of the Colorado Plateau horizon, piñatas) in ways that offend, amuse, stun, resonate, and mesmerize. Often simultaneously. Her current exhibition Departures, on view through September 7 at Kouri + Corrao Gallery in Santa Fe, treads this familiar territory while venturing into heretofore unexplored personal and professional domains.