Mr. Snuggles Forever
at Commonwealth and Council,
Los Angeles

Amanda Walters

The show within a show Mr. Snuggles Forever is a collaboration between Jennifer Moon and laub. The show proposes the magical potential of relational love through the celebration of the life of Los Angeles artist, Jennifer Moon’s late canine companion, Mr. Snuggles and their relationship. As part of Moon’s exhibition, Familial Technologies at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, Mr. Snuggles Forever enacts a utopian fantasy and possibility for familial relations. Familial Technologies explores trauma, self-care, and the structure of family as an ideological apparatus, as seen through Moon’s own family.

As a collaboration with Moon’s nuclear family, the exhibition consists of each member’s art therapy projects, self-made avatars, and soundless projections of family therapy sessions.

Stefan’s “vision board”, detail.

Jennifer’s “vision board”, detail

Within the larger show, Mr. Snuggles Forever becomes a proposal for a different familial dynamic of love and support. The relationship between Moon and Mr. Snuggles is portrayed in cloth banners depicting fantastical and very literal forms of story telling. They become religious icons when Moon and Mr. Snuggles are depicted as Mary and a baby Jesus; he explores the transformation from life to afterlife when depicted with winged back among broken bones; his role as an unconditionally supportive companion is illustrated in a triptych of his portrait along side images of needles and spoons as representations of Moon’s past drug addiction. Mr. Snuggles explores many possibilities of transformation through an afterlife, and all its possibilities. Several banners depict him tethered between two realities, whether by literal tether, dimensional grid, or his actual presence in the gallery. His skeletal body hangs winged from the ceiling, while his furry exterior has been transformed into a fanny pack.    


✨ Mr. Snuggles FOREVER ✨, 2018. Mr. Snuggles' bones, glass, resin, wood, thread, wire, glue. Approx. 14 x 31 x 21.5 in Bone articulation by David Bell and Joel Freeman

Installation view

As banners the works become political declarations for this possible relational future. Many of the works borrow familiar iconography of familiar flags and banners. In the title work of the exhibition, laub and Moon reconfigure the rainbow flag with the added message, “Mr. Snuggles Forever.” The message adds a suggestion for a potential dynamic for love between two beings that is imbued with magic through its lack of judgment and total acceptance, ideas commonly accepted between canine-human relationships, but proposed here as a model for what could be between humans as well.



Commonwealth and Council 3006 West 7th Street, Los Angeles