Managing Editor
Lately, Mojgan Edalat-McClusky is thinking a lot about what she refers to as her “lost childhood.” Knowing her personal history, it’s easy to understand why the Iranian-born minimal-contemporary artist, who now lives with her husband in downtown Long Beach, is focusing on this theme in her current series of paintings.
“My mom left us when I was 5, and my brother was just 3 months old,” she said. “But I’m not counting the first time she left me before, when my brother was born and I was 2 years old.”
Art history is rife with artists creating homages to their moms. I myself began painting after my mother’s death; it was a tremendously effective form of therapy for me, and doing portraits of her soothed my soul. But when Edalat-McClusky depicts the maternal archetype, there’s a distinct absence of warmth and reverence. In fact, the minimalist approach that she typically takes to her work fits appropriately to express her feelings toward the woman who bore her in the mid-1960s.
However, she has already made those paintings that directly (or ambiguously) addressed that hurtful and complicated relationship. Now, she’s concentrating on childhood in a broader sense, albeit with her own distinctive point of view.
She started her current series of mostly large paintings about two years ago. In her spacious studio on the first floor of the Walker Building, her creations, with predominantly white backgrounds, loom so large they practically become the walls of the room. The black line-drawing form of a nude, faceless young woman with long tresses is a motif that appears in most of the pieces. Her naked body inhabits a world in which perspective is shifted. A hopscotch drawing is turned to face the viewer, and the woman sits on its side, as if to discombobulate the real world’s spatial relationships. The same figure holds a helium balloon, but it is below her, and she seems to be levitating near the top of the painting.
“It’s about how you try and keep in touch with your childhood but it just keeps leaving you, and it just gets distant and distant,” she said. “So this idea came to me somehow of a coloring book, but it’s more of an adult version.”
Another piece shows oval-shaped, three-dimensional forms that are “candy-colored,” as Edalat-McClusky describes them, adhered onto the woman’s face, perfectly forming the shape of her head without a face. “I made them faceless so that everybody can put their own face to it,” she said.
She uses her own daughter, who is now in her mid-20s, as her model— and perhaps as her muse. In addition to utilizing her art to understand and cope with her relationship with her absent mother, Edalat-McClusky has committed herself to fostering a loving, strong bond with her own daughter. She is determined to be the mother that she never had.
To view more of Edalat-McClusky’s work, visit mojee.com .
