“I’ve always been drawn to exploring ideas from the Hudson River School,” says artist Cobi Moules, who cites the 19th-century group’s pastoral representations of the relationship between God, nature, and the individual as the original inspiration for his contemporary landscape paintings. Moules, who grew up in rural central California and now lives in Philadelphia, began to study the Hudson River painters during his MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (today the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University) 15 years ago. “I grew up in a very conservative place with a conservative family. And being queer and trans, through this conservative Christian lens, I’m going against God; I’m unnatural and I’m supposed to suppress all these things about myself,” he says. Studying the Hudson River School sparked Moules “to renegotiate my relationship with this landscape and my body, who I am,” by imbuing contemporary landscapes with symbols of queerness.
Moules begins each work by recreating a stereotypical Hudson River School painting—waterfalls or mountain ranges, suffused with beatific light. Then, he adds in a subversive, modern-day element—a smattering of glittering jock straps, to show that an impromptu, Dionysian party of sorts took place there. “They’re bright and they’re beautiful and they’re kind of seductive,” he says. After the paint has dried, Moules pours silicone on top of the canvas, then adds freckles and hair to create “a fluid, amorphous, non-gendered, queer body.” “With the silicone, I was thinking of 1980s horror movies,” he says. “These blob characters are the ‘other’ coming to destroy your small-town conservative life.” But Moules hopes to reframe the presence of the “other”—in this case, the queer body—as something much more fun and welcoming. “The history and reference points are so heavy, but I am using play and humor as a means to challenge that,” he says, “and it’s the joy within that that I hope the viewer experiences and takes away from the work.”
