Danielle Mužina

Femme In the End Times

Opening Reception: Friday, February 7, 2025 | 6-8 pm

Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Femme In the End Times, an exhibition of new paintings by Cleveland-based artist Danielle Mužina. This is Mužina’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

The work in “Femme In the End Times” exhibition continues to ask questions about gender-based oppression through envisioning fractured, pink-drenched parallel worlds where characters confront personal and collective agency. In these new additions to her Pink Apocalypse series, she delves further into the rituals, relationships, and acts of care that emerge as survival strategies when structures crumble. These paintings juxtapose moments of vigilance, intimacy, and transformation to question how we navigate our tenuous present. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work with an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography.

In Lookout (oil on panel, 24 x 30 in, 2024), two figures occupy unstable ground amidst freshly felled logs and diamonds of ominous pink light. One gazes outward through binoculars, embodying a watchful and anxious readiness, while the other lingers near a house that feels both like refuge and rupture. Their postures reflect divergent approaches to survival: one adamantly searching for safety or threats, the other enduring with knowing resolve in an uneasy stillness.

This work emerged from the heightened urge to nurture community and build sanctuary—a "safe house"— as a queer person, woman, and survivor amidst looming societal and political instability going into 2025 in the United States. Throughout the series, acts of care, rebellion, and change emerge as vital survival strategies - even as motives and outcomes remain ambiguous. Rituals of connection—healing gestures, exchanges of knowledge, and moments of trust—become sources of empowerment and solidarity when external systems fail and environments collapse. Vivid color reinforces the emotional intensity of these imaginings. The dense patterns and shifting planes in my compositions echo the cyclical nature of fear, resilience, and preparation, evoking the emotional and physical precarity felt by marginalized individuals facing layered and ongoing adversity.

These paintings visualize the blurred lines between safety and danger as we take on the work that lies ahead. By foregrounding the tension between vigilance and rest, isolation and solidarity, and vulnerability and strength, she invites viewers to reflect on how we care for ourselves and one another in the face of upheaval.

The characters in her figurative paintings interface with ambiguous social, physical, and environmental happenings as a metaphor for the ways we navigate our tenuous contemporary moment. Dr. Blasey-Ford's courageous testimony and the #MeToo movement fueled her bravery in making paintings about her survivorship. She questions the impact of gender performance and trauma on relationships, selfhood, and experiences of space. Her works move through and react to the world around her as a survivor and a femme lesbian. She feels herself responding and resisting pressures for gender performance.

In her current work, women react to an apocalyptic turn of events - the sky is often in the process of turning an unnatural shade of pink, and characters reveal ominous magenta wounds. Characters prepare for wanted or unwanted changes, real or imagined threats, and sufficient or insufficient resolutions in an uncertain future. Within and between groups, responses to environmental forces vary, creating either tension or solidarity. Her work grapples with the role figures play actively or inactively, together or divided, in both contributing to and addressing internal and external crises.

Danielle Mužina is an artist and educator from Cleveland, Ohio. She received her B.F.A at Ohio Wesleyan University, her M.A. at Eastern Illinois University, and her M.F.A. at Miami University. Mužina has studied at the Jerusalem Studio School in Civita Castellana, Italy, and completed residencies at Chautauqua School of Art, the Vermont Studio Center, and The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. Her current Pink Apocalypse series was recognized with an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and national scholarly organization SECAC’s Outstanding Artistic Achievement Award in 2021. Her artwork is included in John Seed’s 2023 book More Disruption: Representational Art in Flux, and she recently co-authored Creativity & Hope Amid Educational Restrictions in Viewfinder, the online journal of NAEA’s Museum Education division.