MOCAD presents Martha Mysko: Retail Therapy, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. This presentation offers an expansive view of Mysko’s practice, bringing together new works alongside Vanity Room, an immersive installation re-staged and re-imagined in Detroit for the first time. Inviting viewers into spaces at once intimate and overwhelming, Retail Therapy reflects on the paradoxes of contemporary life, probing what lies beneath and between the surface(s).

Mysko is known for creating large-scale works that collapse distinctions between painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture, extending the art-historical lineage of the “total installation” into a distinctly contemporary vernacular. Working with an evolving vocabulary of thrifted furniture, decorative objects, textiles, mirrors, and digital imagery, she transforms everyday materials into dense assemblages that expand the possibilities of painting beyond the canvas. Described by Mysko as a “painterly sensibility”, this approach anchors her practice in the tactile experience of making, even as it liberates her work from the constraints of any single medium.

Within Retail Therapy, Mysko dislocates the familiar through constructed environments that evoke American shopping malls, sitcom sets, and suburban interiors. Generic surfaces, pastel palettes, and thrifted décor summon the aesthetics of retail display and domestic comfort, only to reveal the social and psychological structures that sustain them. In this way, Mysko invites viewers to look more closely, beyond the layers of artifice–whether material or symbolic–to question what truly resides behind the appearances of taste, beauty, and the “good life.”

Drawing on surrealist strategies of radical juxtaposition and the uncanny, Mysko harnesses the potential of cliché to deceive, cultivating a subtle radicalism in which sweetness masks critique. Her own position as consumer becomes part of the work’s logic: a meditation on desire, performance, and the feminine condition, where presentation, façade, and expectation become sites of both tension and freedom.