Controlled Burn | Shirley Moneyhon | Sep 11th – Nov 7th, до 6 ноября

Assistant Curator: Michaela Katsevich

Shirley Moneyhon’s solo exhibition, Controlled Burn, marks her receipt of the Be’eri Gallery Award at the Freshpaint Art Fair 2025. Awarded annually to an outstanding artist from the Independent Artists’ Greenhouse, the prize includes a solo exhibition, a production budget, an artist fee, and an accompanying monograph. As the award’s fourth recipient, Moneyhon holds a BFA in Visual Communication from Shenkar College, where she is currently

pursuing an MFA in Fine Art.

In her inaugural solo exhibition, Moneyhon delves into a primeval realm of cross-cultural iconography and subtle sorcery, transposing it into a mythical, ritualized domestic space. Working across painting, drawing, ceramics, casting, and wax, she employs ritualistic gestures and her own body to playfully invoke the symbols, customs, and totems embedded in everyday life.

The visual narratives she constructs — often featuring her own image — are unruly, volatile, eccentric, and laced with humour. They ignite and spill over. A chicken, a ladder, a spark, a flame, a skull, and the artist herself become tools for unsettling order and reality. Emerging as a mythological trickster, Moneyhon’s figures are mischievous and wryly vengeful, taking evident pleasure in minor disruptions and casual sabotage. She releases impulses from her inner world that remain contained, stopping short of malice or sinister intent; instead, they

act as catalysts of chaos, unravelling existing structures to cultivate a fertile state of disorder.

Ceramic vessels with elongated, sticky-hand limbs morph into a multi-limbed monster totem, beneath which Moneyhon’s head lies crushed. A plucked chicken at the center of the Shabbat table — evidently exasperated by its fate — sets the house ablaze. Moneyhon’s figure is caught in strange conspiracy with candle flames that threaten to set her hair alight. The exaggerated grins of her playful ceramic figures carry an unsettling tension, brimming with the unpredictability of creatures capable of anything. This disruptive force, surging from deep within, effortlessly and joyously dismantles rigid belief systems and familiar rituals.

Moneyhon’s work meets Be’eri Gallery at a moment that demands a candid reckoning with sterile, rigid structures, exposing the illusory scaffolding of our psychological and social spheres. It evokes the vital, destructive energy needed to clear away the old and make space for new configurations. Ultimately, the exhibition invites us to align with the psyche’s magical forces and primeval drives for transformation, surrendering to their vital, cathartic release.