In the fall of 2020, while I was vying for those rainbow lights and fog machines to try and liven up the many live performances I was doing out of my apartment, Cicognani was using party store special effects in combination with video projections and the aforementioned bathtub to create what became “Mothership” (2021), a small inflatable pool lined with mirrors and LED lights, and topped with a disco ball, like a tiny wet fun house. Christina Catherine Martinez takes notes. My notebook is wet.Īrtist Tita Cicognani, right, built a hot tub for a show at the Hammer Museum. “It was definitely related to how I felt at the time – very isolated and very alienated. “The first bathtub I made during stage one of the COVID lockdown and it was at our temporary graduate studios in Chinatown,” she says. The tub isn’t just red, it’s red crocodile skin vinyl (red crocodiles don’t even exist! Who’s making this thing up!) filled on all sides with built-in video screens and sitting beneath holograms floating saucers and sparkling hearts ripped straight from a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. Cicognani’s “Heart Tub” installation doubles the stickiness to religious frenzy, a trance at the secular altar of desire. But loving is nothing if not embarrassing, his expressions always a little hollow. We are seated in her current, sturdy, non-inflatable installation, currently housed at the Hammer Museum, where she has agreed to interview me outside of normal museum hours, when visitors can sign up for a 45-minute slot to s imbue in “Heart Tub” (2022), which is exactly that: the schmaltzy mainstay of low-budget love nests that started popping up in places like the Poconos in the early 1970s, propelling the obsession with ‘America for hysterical love in the decade that taste forgot.Īrtist Tita Cicognani stands against the hot tub that is part of her new multimedia installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum.įunny thing about the heart-shaped bathtub: what started out as an overdetermined catalyst for romance has since morphed into a symbol of naughtiness (see: “Failure”). “There are three versions of the tubs,” she says, “all very different.” She also started making large installations combining her videos with sculptural elements and soundscapes around a central element: inflatable spas. The title might give you an idea of the tone – CGI animations of a writhing figure with gray skin and a black bikini are cut with chaotically short clips from “The Notebook”, “Titanic”, Taylor Swift and Christina Aguilera videos, and various Internet meme videos – a montage of pop culture’s greatest romance hits and seduction Top 40. Her 2020 video “I’m so full of lust and desire it shoots out of my knees as they scrape the ground I crawl to you” is almost a protest against the conditions of her own making. New York-born, Los Angeles-based artist Tita Cicognani had worked primarily in sculpture and assemblage, an insistently material practice with odd invitations to the body, like a chair with a spiked seat titled “Bad Student” (2019) or a pink-lit installation of BDSM furniture, all upholstered in soft white sheepskin (“Fuzz Dungeon”, 2019). I asked what the occasion of the sale was and he shrugged and replied, “I’m dematerializing my practice”, which I took as a shortcut to video – something that many magazines online tried in 2015 and what most of us were forced to do. I left with a fog machine, a strobe light, rainbow-colored light bulbs, and a few books of artists’ writings, one titled “Failure,” the other, “Appropriation.”. Shortly before the pandemic, I had a prophetic studio visit with a sculptor who was having a sale outside of his workspace.
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