Growing up in Chile, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz doodled incessantly. “Like any teenager, and especially a queer teenager coming out,” they say, “I had a lot of questions and feelings that I was trying to express through those drawings.” The subject of gender, especially how it is often reduced to a binary, preoccupied them. “I was obsessed with popular characters that have a double: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Daisy—basically how they are the same character except for their clothes.” Now, as a part of the solo exhibition “Deep, Deep Woods” at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Schliebener Muñoz has created a site-specific installation “about the construction of childhood and how that intersects with gender and class.” It centers on Raggedy Ann and Andy.
Deep, Deep Woods, 2024, view of multimedia installation at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy Mattress Factory, credit Tom Little.)
The Mattress Factory is home to the archived papers and works of the late transgender artist Greer Lankton, including her site-specific installation It’s All About ME, Not You. Schliebener Muñoz pored over the archive and noticed striking resonances with their own work. Some of Lankton’s drawings, for example, happened to feature Raggedy Ann and Andy, so Schliebener Muñoz incorporated them throughout “Deep, Deep Woods.” The drawings are flanked by wall murals that show the dolls picking at their seams, a way of deconstructing gender as the dolls deconstruct themselves. “Gender can be performative or used as an accessory, no?” Schliebener Muñoz says. “I think my works are super playful.”
