The characters in Danielle Mužina’s 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.

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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.

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Within and between groups, responses to environmental forces vary, creating either tension or solidarity. Her immigrant grandmother, reflecting on witnessing national crises in former Yugoslavia, reminds her to “to pay attention when the sky’s bleeding even if someone tells you it’s not.

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Throughout the series, acts of care, rituals, rebellion, and change emerge as vital survival strategies - even as motives and outcomes remain ambiguous. Her work grapples with the role figures play actively or inactively, together or divided, in both contributing to and addressing internal and external crises.