ABOUT ROMY AURA MALOON

Though I was born in the United States, my cultural and familial history is resolutely one of other places and identities. As Jewish South Africans, my parents fled the apartheid government of South Africa, not as an act of protest, but rather in fear that the changing tides of history might one day swallow them--swallow us--whole. My work is an attempt to ingratiate and reconcile these disparate identities and geographic spaces with my own personal politics. As a first generation Southern American born of South African parents, I am forever bound to confront the history of a country I have never lived in; yet I am linked by blood.

My sculptures are a tongue-in-cheek re-imagining of stock "African" and American kitsch images: the slain antelope, the mounted rifle, embellished to mitigate their disturbing imagery. I create sculptures that are generally fractured and broken; the material echoes the cultural and social fissures created by cultural and generational displacement. The image of fractured small game animal parts (predominantly the horn) mimics the hunting trophy, but reconfigures its aesthetic and position. Mounted hunting trophies and guns can insight feelings of great unease or admiration depending on the perspective of the viewer. No matter how an individual feels about hunting as sport, it is an activity of power and dominance. It is this space, between the unsettling and the beautiful, the fractured and whole, the displaced and the rooted, that I encourage the viewer to question.

I have a BFA from the Ringling college of Art and Design, was selected to attend the New York Studio Program in 2007, and studied traditional monastic artistry in Tibet.