“I have had times in my life where I absolutely felt the emptiness of space,” installation artist Thais Mather reflects. “At certain times it has been a deep connection to an infinite unknown force, and at other times it has been the deepest voids of myself that have cracked open at the most difficult moments in my life.”
The work featured in her upcoming show taps into that sense of infinite space conjured by grief and the strength of imagination in a series of watercolor paintings depicting female forms through which viewers can catch a glimpse of the expanse of the cosmos. Its title — Miss Universe — plays a dual role, evoking the hyper-feminine performance of pageant queens and hinting at the feminine connection to the eternal.
“When we face deep adversities and we are at the edge of grief, when we feel every cell in our being at a level in which we would love to escape to some other infinite space, this is the time in which we truly know who we are.”
While Mather's artistic practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, printmaking, painting, new media, and installation, one source of inspiration remains a constant: feminism and femininity. Mather recalls how, as a child, she felt deeply connected to a feminine identity: “I was an extreme girly pop,” she says. “I loved all things girl, and wanted to be as forwardly girly as possible: I wanted doll houses, I loved Jem — Barbie’s punk rock twin — I dressed in the most insane girly drag with little girl makeup smeared all over my face. I was extraordinarily girl-feeling in my identity.”
This rootedness in femininity carried through to adulthood: Mather now holds an MFA in installation art and feminist theory from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has been a student and teacher of feminism for more than a decade. Recently, she has been reflecting further on the hyper-femme identity she experienced as a child. “The most interesting facet of that identity is how little it had to do with boys,” she notes. “I was overtly interested in femininity without any context for what that meant in terms of my desirability to men or boys, and I do not believe it was because I realized the cultural cache for what that meant in terms of power and sex. I just saw Jem’s earrings glistening, I just jammed on Material Girl — because it was so deeply focused on how I felt about myself. I belonged in the world of the pink guitar and leggings, I knew this was my place.”
As she grew older, however, her relationship with this hyper-femme identity became less straightforward; her journey through becoming a wife, a mother, and then a single mother offering both fulfillment and joy and profound personal struggle. She articulates the periods of despair she experienced in the context of the climate crisis: “We live in a time in which we want to deeply escape what we have created as human beings," she says. "The amount of time we've been on earth is so minuscule compared to the timeline of our earth, and it feels heartbreaking, as a human being — a creative being whose mind can imagine absolutely infinite brilliant possibilities — that our existence on this earth, our legacy might be that we actually destroy it for ourselves.” The echoes of this grief in the artist's personal life became a crucible in which a new, more nuanced identity was forged. “I believe that when we face deep challenges, it's not just that we learn who we are, it's that we actually change who we are,” Mather says. “When we face deep adversities and we are at the edge of grief, when we feel every cell in our being at a level in which we would love to escape to some other infinite space, this is the time in which we truly know who we are.”
Mather's paintings bring the viewer along on this journey, offering a window into the illimitable and inviting her audience to probe what may lie in the deepest voids within themselves. “To anyone who feels broken, let yourself break all the way open — for the light, the space, the person who emerges is who you truly are,” Mather says. “Being at the edge of yourself, you see there is an entire other horizon you would have never otherwise found."