Honeymoon Sweet Nothings

Honeymoon Suite Nothings was an exhibition/installation inspired by a place that, according to Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality, “the poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe.”

Born of the uncompromising vision of former beauty queen and avid accordion player Phyllis Madonna, the Madonna Inn is a pilgrimage for the imagination, a mental Mecca for California artists and retirees alike. It has the most uncanny ability to be at once wholesome, opulent, and debauched. It's a place that suggests that our immediate realities are tentative, at best: between the walls of each compartmentalized theme room, fantasy and reality reconcile and cease to exist as contradictory states. One suspects that the profusion of mirrors in each of the suites IS in fact a network of portals to other worlds, and darker dimensions.

It is in this sovereign visual universe of Rococo cherubs and rock waterfall showers, in the spirit of double meanings and hidden realities, that the Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. hold their annual strategic planning meetings. All of the Madonna Inn tableaux were shot on 35 mm print film during one such retreat, and then printed as large-format digital files during an artist residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. Honeymoon Sweet Nothings was presented at Lizabeth Oliveria’s San Francisco gallery in 2003.