The Cat Wife with Morgane Richer La Flèche
Q&A with the artist on the occasion of her recent exhibition
Dear readers,
Thank you for taking the time to read my rambles this year, I promise to post more consistently in 2025. It’s one of my New Year’s resolutions. I have a few musings that I’m researching and polishing up to send out in the next few weeks. For the past month I’ve been mentally gearing myself up to push myself creatively, I’m excited to see where the path I forge will lead me now that I’m making a real effort.
I’ve been in my hometown of Las Vegas for the past week. It’s been grounding to be back here and take in this landscape with fresh eyes again. I haven’t returned home in 5 years and I feel like I lived at least two extra lives since my last return. The city has changed and hasn’t in many ways, but I’m also on a big research kick of looking at Googie Architecture. Vegas is very underappreciated in being recognized as a mid-century architecture gold silver mine, but I’m sure that’s because everything old gets imploded to make way for sterile garishness consistently.
Before the year ends, I’d be remiss to not share some insightful conversations I’ve had with a few of my favorite artists. For 1202 Magazine, I had the honor of asking Ingrid Donat a few questions about her current exhibition titled Ancestral at Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
During my pre-holiday gallery visits, a standout presentation was the joint exhibition by Morgane Richer La Flèche and Janie Korn titled The Cat Wife at Salon 21. The 17th century French fable of the same name was the impetus that inspired the for the tactile, energetic, and fasnataical paintings and sculptures on view by both artists. All of which embody the complex fantasy and reality of the transformations of the female body that are pressed upon by outside forces and self imposed as we break through the cracks of broken systems to live our truths.
The beauty of living in the social media age is being able to connect with artists I admire with a quick direct message. Morgane graciously answered some questions I had about this exhibition, which you can read below.
✨Happy New Year Everyone ✨
Lauren Vaccaro: The Cat Wife was one of my favorite shows I've seen this year. Your paintings and Janie's candles and stands made it feels as if I stumbled into a book of fairytales, but with an edge. Can you tell me a little more about how this show came together and what was the inspiration behind it?
Morgane Richer La Flèche: Thank you! I was looking for a way back into my world after a slew of surgeries for endometriosis took me out of the studio. I was rereading Jean de La Fontaine’s fables—which are familiar to any francophone kid—and came across a story I’d never heard of before, about a man who falls in love with his cat and transforms her into his bride. I pictured this feline woman hunting mice on all-fours and loved her at once. And then I met Mariah and it felt like fate. I knew she was the Cat Wife as soon as I saw her. When Alex from Salon 21 came for a studio visit, she saw a collaborative piece I’d done with Janie and suggested a joint show. Janie’s work is a perfect fit for a show that interrupts an old fable, and broadened the show beyond my own obsessions.
LV: The figure in these paintings expresses seductively ferocious and visceral emotions that I would like to summon in myself. How did you paint her expressions from life? How did you meet your muse and how did you decide on the outfit for the Cat Wife?
MRLF: I had never worked with anyone like this before. I usually make up my characters, or use myself as a model, or take reference pictures of friends and then distort them into cartoons. My work reckons with solipsism. But one day I was having coffee with my friends, and spontaneously decided to go with them to observe the Elena Velez casting call (in late summer 2023). Mariah was there because she had been cast as a model in the show. I invited her to my studio with her black cat Sebastian, whom she had just adopted. I grabbed a white burlesque dress from my closet that felt like the right mix of erotic and bridal: the Cat Wife is literally the embodiment of a male fantasy, who is ultimately revealed to be untamable. It all fell into place so perfectly, we joked that I had conjured Mariah (and the dress is hers now).
LV: One of my favorite sections of the show was the series of small paintings capturing the Cat Wife in different poses, its as if we're on the precipice of seeing a full transformation like a butterfly in the chrysalis stage. What inspired you to work in this intimate scale?
MRLF: I wanted to play with the idea of women’s desirability being bound in smallness. The series is titled Pocket Brides because it's a collection of portraits you could carry with you, but also because the man in the fable equates a pet and a wife, imagining a woman who is in his pocket. The scale references pornographic playing cards, 18th-century miniature paintings kept in boudoir cabinets, and pre-photography engagement portraits: erotic objects for personal consumption. Collecting images of women as a libidinal act.
That’s why it was so important for these little romantic objects to depict her caught in a grotesque forced transformation, experiencing the horror of metamorphosis in real-time. They are sequential but they’re also an exploration of who the character is, testing out different versions, like designing your character at the beginning of a video game.
LV: I know that you also put on a puppet show on the occasion of this exhibition. That is certainly something I don't see many artists do, I wish they did because it's such a fun way to activate the work! What was the process like in bringing your inspiration to life in this format?
MRLF: I’m so grateful to my friends for lending their time and talent to my puppet show. We were planning to host a more conventional gallery talk, and decided to pivot at the last minute. I reached out to friends in puppeteering, performance, and music…I will be floating on their love for a long time.
I had been making doll-like sculptures as part of my world-building process, so it was a short leap to puppets. Puppets are sinister and magical, and I like the challenge of bringing childlike storytelling to an adult audience. The Cat Wife was steeped in so much historical, literary and personal context, so I wanted to give people a chance to engage more deeply with the ideas in the show. Using puppets reflects the comedy that’s always in my work too.
LV: The visual cohesion of color and whimsy through the show reminded me of the spaces you paint for clients. What is the process like of bringing a client's visions to life through your artistic style? Do you have a particular favorite project you've worked on?
MRLF: I never expected to paint walls in other people’s homes. I painted my own walls during lockdown in a fit of inspiration, and people started reaching out over the years. It’s a welcome break from the intense intellectual and emotional involvement I bring to my work in the studio. Working in someone’s personal space, creating something with their input that they will live with daily, feels like a gift of trust and intimacy. Sometimes it’s about connecting the home to a sense of place, other times it’s closer to illustrating someone’s life, and sometimes it’s about weaving their favorite things into an immersive painting. A client once showed me her box of fungi and stones, which led me to look at Victorian fairy paintings for the project.
LV: Lastly, because the relationship between one's home and creative output has been on my mind lately, do you decorate your home in a way that reflects your art or inspirations?
MRLF: I do, but I share my home with my husband, so I try not to swallow the whole space. I think it’s good to live in a way that integrates my sprawling fantasy world and someone else’s reality. I live with a lot of furniture and clothing passed down from my French grandmother, who was a defining presence in my early life. Being surrounded by her things keeps me in constant dialogue with the energy behind a lot of my work.
Artist Bio:
Morgane Richer La Flèche is a Canadian-born, New York-based multidisciplinary artist. A self-taught artist, she works primarily in oil paint, pastels, soft sculpture, and video. She is inspired by the world-building of Florine Stettheimer and Lewis Carroll, the theatrical arts, lyric poetry, French literature, her Catholic upbringing, body horror,and the Rococo period. Her work is visceral, as in pink for flesh and red for blood, as in decadence of excess but also of decay and decomposition. Whether in paint, pastel or wool felt, her textures are simultaneously viscous and diaphanous. While her paintings are steeped in narrative, she plays with abstraction to create sinister landscapes that are always swirling, deteriorating and melding—a nod to hyperspace, virtual realities, and the architecture of cathedrals arching towards heaven.