A gallery room is adorned with painted pink and blue walls. On the walls, cartoonish line drawings sprawl across the surface. A fabric-found object sculpture sits in the right corner. Diptych-like paintings hang from the walls at a low level. — Catalina Schliebener Muñoz: *was it a cat i saw*, 2025. Installation view, Olympia Gallery New York. Photo courtesy of the gallery and artist.

Currently, Olympia’s lower level is filled with recognizable debris. Framed drawings of vinyl cutouts of cartoon animals sit perched at varying intervals across the room, forcing our eyes to dart across the walls. The drawings are housed twice, both by actual frames and wall vinyls, severed cartoon limbs reaching out across the space. Soft sculptures, too, resembling amputated Tigger tails, sit curled in corners, extending out of drywall. Though light and cheerful in color palette, the work takes on a morbid quality, a thread of amputation apparent across the installation. The images are both deeply familiar and unrecognizable, and much of our time at Olympia is spent trying to recognize them, connecting them to something in the corners of our minds.

Catalina Schliebener Muñoz’s solo presentation at Olympia, was it a cat i saw, comes a year after the artist’s institutional presentation at the Queens Museum in New York and their exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pennsylvania. At these two recent shows, Schliebener Muñoz’s work deeply considered each institution’s archive, site-specific in its conceptual focus. In our conversation, the artist spoke of their show at Olympia as a refreshing opportunity to scale down after this intense period of larger, research-heavy work.

A gallery room's walls are painted light pink and blue. Along the walls, cartoonish line drawings are painted on. Colorful, plush sculptures are scattered in the corners of the space. A grid of works on paper take up much of the central wall. — Catalina Schliebener Muñoz: *was it a cat i saw*, 2025. Installation view, Olympia Gallery New York. Photo courtesy of the gallery and artist.

Though was it a cat i saw is not site-specific in its archival research, the artist’s work is always research-based. From films, photographs, lost-and-found bins, and children’s books, their images source a visual language from American cartoons, specifically Disney, to form a vocabulary of childhood nostalgia tied to United States propaganda. The artist was raised in Chile in the 1980s, where they grew up watching American children’s cartoons. The artist became fascinated with the medium’s history as a tool, used to assert American exceptionalism locally and abroad. The Good Neighbor Policy, for example, was developed to create a palatable image of the US in South America during and after World War II (the artist specifically explored this policy at the Queens Museum). Schliebener Muñoz started working with this language while still living in Chile, but after moving to America, this work began carrying a different set of connotations, as the artist began working in the country where this visual vocabulary originated.

Much of the material in Schliebener Muñoz’s show at Olympia was sourced from a separate project that never materialized. The artist was developing a proposal for the Keith Haring bathroom at The Center, a queer community space in Manhattan. The bathroom—containing the last mural the artist made before passing from AIDS—is now a kind of memorial. Schliebener Muñoz proposed to make a responsive wall piece that would occupy the space under the original piece with their signature vinyl decals; a sort of exquisite corpse, a conversation between two queer artists. But after years of preparing the materials and assembling the proposal, the Keith Haring Foundation backed out of the project, deeming the room too sensitive, too much of a space of mourning, for the project to materialize. Schliebener Muñoz is now in the midst of producing a zine reflecting on this experience, which will include the curatorial text written by Avram Finkelstein for the show at The Center along with a dialogue between the artist and their colleague JD Pluecker.

Schliebener Muñoz was left with a large amount of vinyl, which for a year collected dust in a corner of their studio, a reminder of the limitations of institutions. Who designates an artist’s legacy? Who decides who gets to interact with history? When do rooms become sacred?

A 2D work is framed in blue and has a similar baby-blue background. The subject of the painting is a symmetrical, cartoonish structure painted in thick, black lines. The subject resembles a cartoon Rorschach test. — Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, *Coloring Book Series: Goofy*, 2023–25. Photo courtesy of the gallery and artist.

The vinyl from the unrealized project at The Center slowly began manifesting into the Coloring Book series, displayed centrally now at Olympia. The drawings are mirrored images, duplicate vinyl reflecting across an unseen boundary at the drawing’s center. The artist sees this gesture as a reference to their teenage obsession with Alice through the Looking Glass, the idea of the mirror as a portal, where the reflected, other world both resembles reality and acts as a separate, distinct zone. This uncanniness is most realized in the artist’s formal move to collage: the medium is both direct and indirect, allowing Schliebener Muñoz to embed an existing image into their work while simultaneously tearing it apart. Memories decompose, recognizable images begin to falter. The image becomes a memory of its source, with an impossibility of returning to the original.

Schliebener Muñoz’s show is an unraveling across a mirror. To enter the exhibition, we must venture down into the gallery’s lower level, descending stairs and turning a corner into a private space not visible from the street. We are, in some sense, entering that looking glass, passing through the portal, to a world where familiar images are made new in their distortion, anthropomorphized fragments transforming into different characters altogether. We are looking at a world built out of subjective experience, from a queer person, an immigrant, a child seeing these images on TV in a country shaped by American interventionism. And what does it mean there for Schliebener Muñoz to have looked through the glass of the television screen, to look into the portal of the American imagination that they could not yet access? What does it mean, now, for the artist to have reached across this portal and to have dismantled these images for us?

The work with Disney characters is, on a surface level, an appropriation of canonical American imagery. But in looking closer, the work acts as a record of the artist’s decision to step through the portal themselves. They are now working in this uncanny world, and we are left searching for the images in the corners of our heads, feeling like we have stepped away—miles away—and are looking at them through a mirror.