Femminuccia is both an endearment for a baby girl and a diminutive insult meaning cowardly, a
sissy. Comical, yet unflinching in its inward/outward gaze, Elana Mallov employs her art-making
to engage with and examine her pregnancy (with a girl) in the United States in 2018. Mallov
turns to the forms and conventions of Romanesque and Gothic artwork,playing off of religious
iconography that featured grotesque beasts and monsters vanquished by female saints,
borrows from and reimagines tomb monuments, decorative shields, illuminated manuscripts
and the capitals of columns. Working in plaster, paint, wood, and on paper, Mallov engenders
art objects which are both vessel and lens to weave together a fragmented storytelling of
familial life from within the uterus and out.
sissy. Comical, yet unflinching in its inward/outward gaze, Elana Mallov employs her art-making
to engage with and examine her pregnancy (with a girl) in the United States in 2018. Mallov
turns to the forms and conventions of Romanesque and Gothic artwork,playing off of religious
iconography that featured grotesque beasts and monsters vanquished by female saints,
borrows from and reimagines tomb monuments, decorative shields, illuminated manuscripts
and the capitals of columns. Working in plaster, paint, wood, and on paper, Mallov engenders
art objects which are both vessel and lens to weave together a fragmented storytelling of
familial life from within the uterus and out.