Stigliani’s “Drawing” (acrylic, colored pencil and wax on rice paper).
Claire Stigliani’s universe is populated with images from real life and fairy tales, paintings and puppets. Her new, dreamlike show, Half-Sick of Shadows (at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art through Sept. 4) explores stories of female transgression through a distinctive, multistep process that begins with a drawing, transforms into puppet theater and video, and finally ends in her dense, layered paintings.
“There’s a way that this process weaves together my life and fantasy life. My puppets move between the two,” says Stigliani, 32, a former MFA graduate student at UW-Madison who now lives in Long Island, N.Y.
Stigliani first played with “miniature theater” — or puppet theater — when she was a child in Vienna, Austria. Her father — a scientific researcher looking into the effects of the Chernobyl disaster — bought her an antique puppet theater as a last-minute gift from the airport in what was then Czechoslovakia. Stigliani was fascinated by the mini-stage and became obsessed with making dolls.
After years of focusing primarily on painting, Stigliani returned to the idea of miniature theater. She began by first creating a single drawing. She then built a puppet theater (along with all the figures and props) from that drawing. Later, she made a small film with the puppets in the set before turning the film stills into paintings. Stigliani says she was attracted to the idea because it allowed her to create sets for her films. “I think of them as moving paintings,” she says.
As a painter, Stigliani found she could generally only work for about four hours at a time. But creating the puppet theaters revived the endless energy she had while making dolls as a child. She found herself working 12 hours at a time. “The studio can be like hell or it can be like a heaven,” she says. “With this show, I loved being with this work and in the studio.”
Half-Sick of Shadows revolves around three stories: the biblical telling of Adam and Eve; a Grimms’ fairy tale, “The Snow Child,” as reimagined by the writer Angela Carter; and an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, “The Lady of Shalott.” In each of these stories, a woman transgresses and faces terrible consequences.
Stigliani’s work is filled with images of women working alone, viewing their domains through mirrors, television or computer screens and photos. A fourth installation re-creates Stigliani’s studio, and within that, even smaller renditions of the other sets in the show. “In the end, the work cannibalizes itself,” she says.
There’s a homespun quality to Stigliani’s puppet theater and videos. Obvious strings move and lift each hand. Wide-lined faces are painted on with an almost childlike hand. But these imperfections are part of Stigliani’s vision. At the opening night lecture at MMoCA, she said, “I wanted this show to invoke sympathy rather than skill. I wanted the viewer to feel they could do it, too. I didn’t want to make something slick, but rather something that looks like it went wrong in just the right way.”