. . . to delight in the mire.

fragment of Heraclitus, fifth century BCE

The playful, often profoundly ambivalent element of fantasy in all performance of identity is a defining interest of my practice. As fanciful imagining, fantasy may describe any effect of the stylizing psyche. How does Psyche style her closet? My work observes “the closet” from a mythopoetic perspective that perceives, below the suggestion of a site of repression, a deeper, oneiric elsewhere for the imagination to fancy — especially, to fancy itself.

Style, symbol, and genre intrigue the closeted preference for codedness and misdirection, for hiding in plain sight. Viewed from outside, the closet designates a haunting spectacle of visibility, of subjectivity called into question as public dilemma, created and sustained by fascinating operations of recognition (“it takes one to know one”). Experienced from within, however, the closet is a refuge for any human dimension that remains defiantly undecided, unanswerable, untimely, and obscure.

2019 Yale School of Art — MFA Painting/Printmaking
2017 University of Central Florida — BFA Studio Art
2012 New College of Florida — BA Visual/Critical Studies

WRITING
✳︎ “Inexhaustible of Mystery: An Interview with Jacob Todd Broussard.” Cornelia Magazine, no. 9, May 2022.
✳︎ “Degenerate Utopia: Disney and Disenchantment in Central Florida.” Burnaway, States of Leisure, May 2020. Also published in Laws of Salvage: Burnaway Reader, Atlanta, GA, 2020, pp. 90–101.
✳︎ “Reflections on the Body of Whom.” Body of Work: Yale School of Art 2019, edited by Edi Dai, Willis Kingery, and David Knowles. New Haven, CT, Yale School of Art, 2020, pp. 127–29.
✳︎ “You Are About to Begin Reading”: Accessibility and Postmodernist Performance in Works by Italo Calvino, Christian Jankowski, and Francis Alÿs. Sarasota, FL, New College Division of Humanities, 2012.

PRESS
Fantasy II in Exile at Acadiana Center for the Arts by Veronica Cross. Burnaway, Reviews, November 2021.

EXHIBITIONS
2021 Fantasy II in Exile at Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
2020 Praying on the Name at Kingfish Gallery, Buffalo, NY
2019 Touch at Moisturizer Gallery, Gainesville, FL
2019 Yale Painting & Printmaking at New Release Gallery, New York, NY
2019 Again, Always: Act One at Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2018 Words Cannot Express at Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2018 XL Catlin Art Prize, San Francisco Art Institute, Linda Warren Projects Chicago, & New York Academy of Art
2017 You Can Get In & Not Do Anything at Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2017 Mirror Phase at UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL
2017 Perennials at UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL
2017 A Memory Wingding at City Arts Factory, Orlando, FL
2016 Florida Noir at UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL
2016 S.T.E.A.M. at UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL
2016 Today for Tomorrow at Fusion Gallery, Orlando, FL

emile.mausner@gmail.com

emile mausner

emile mausner

emile
mausner