Avatar: The Last Bimbo’s Bender

Cassidy Ott. Please Don’t Eat the Roadkill!, 2025
acrylic on canvas
64 ½ inches x 64 ½ inches
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
Please do not under any circumstances ingest roadkill, even if the roadkill has rocking hot tits, a tiny waist, and a big fat ass. The roadkill may be super mega sexy, however the taste of burned rubber has permeated the organism’s epidermis, ensuring a bitter taste for any hitchhiker bold enough to attempt consumption.
Desperation / Relinquish / Helpless / I hate new car smell / Acceptance Stage

by Matt Morris

“I’ve taken elements of my personality and blown them up entirely, exaggerated them because it helps me to have this powerful character I can come to when I need a confidence boost. I just tap into that character, and it helps me to feel like I’m completely capable and sure of myself, and deserving of my success and opportunities…I have some other alter egos who help me deal with other aspects of my life.”

–Ashnikko in a 2021 interview with Forbes

Here at the interstices of patriarchy, capitalism, and megalomaniacal Americentrism, times are difficult for women. But when have gendered distinctions made things manageable for the subordinated categories that are produced? Structural power relations have never granted the feminine in even its most expansive definitions a fair shake. This particular beleaguered moment is overloading our nervous systems with despot-second-term-pussy-grabber-Epstein-files-redaction-Quiet-Piggy body horror nightmares with cameo appearances of Pam Bondi blatantly ignoring sexual assault survivors, “trad wives” and the Bible colleges that train them, and a mob of nearly 800 anti-trans bills under review this year in the United States (and the ways these far right sentiments are mirrored elsewhere worldwide). In a reckoning marked as much by desperation as tactical transmutation, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and a multiplicity of womanhood are working into and through the dissociative consciousness-splitting provoked by the machinations of misogynistic culture. In just the past year, painter Cassidy Ott, pop musicians like Slayyyter and Ashnikko, and films from the likes of auteur Maggie Gyllenhaal have been exploring the possibilities of alter egos—variously monstrous, stereotypical, and capricious.

These experiments in empowerment were augured in earlier eras of starkly conservative crackdowns. Smack in the middle of the firestorm that was the Reagan administration, Tina Turner took the form of Aunty Entity in 1984 for the post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and in her accompanying single sang, “We don’t need another hero.” Actually, we did then, and thankfully, powerful female role models like Ms. Tina Turner herself appeared to take a stand against oppressive power systems—in her case, surviving years of domestic abuse, weathering the paternalism of her field and the racism of the world she traveled through, and eventually relinquishing her US citizenship to live as a committed Buddhist in Switzerland. And in these troubled times today, our need for heroes is yielding a phantasia of female alterity transfigured into forms of resistance, monstrosity, and strategic moral deviance in a battle for the very thinkability of autonomous agency for women in the dystopic twenty-first century where we find ourselves.

Niki de Saint Phalle. My love where shall we make love?
and My love where shall we meet again?, c. 1969
color screenprint on wove paper, from a suite of nine
variable dimensions
©️ Niki de Saint Phalle. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94.

A few semesters back, I was facilitating an open studio undergraduate course, conducting one-on-one meetings with students about their self-directed art projects. One precocious bricoleuse said to me, “I think I want to make work about bimbos.” I admitted that it felt like it had been at least twenty years since I’d heard anyone use the word and wondered what it meant to her. She said that men are terrified of the bimbo, scared of how much they pine after her, scared of how she resists their control. She described younger women reappropriating the bimbo in much the same manner as queer people in my generation laid hold of ‘dyke’ and ‘fag,’ and that it denoted a woman being hyper-feminine but messy, unpredictable, demanding, desirable. The student was a bellwether for me, for in the following months and years, I’ve noted a widespread next-gen ‘bimbo-ification’ across Internet culture, pop music, drag, comic art, sexual fetish, and eventually politics in the mainstream.


Fantasy is, perhaps, the starting place for political, social, and sexual counternarrative—as activist an endeavor as protest marches and Molotov cocktails. Condensed into an agent of change, fantasy is rendered as an avatar—an alter ego in costume balls, online forums, video games, kink communities, and survivalist code-switching in advanced stage capitalism who is equipped with wish-images, superpowers, and uncanny extremes that breach limits and preconceptions, allowing for id-induced playfulness-cum-revolt.

Given the always already unsteadiness of art’s intershuffling of representation and real, it’s no wonder that in a century marred by world wars, expanded empires, and industry-stoked ecological meltdown, artists would enact and draw and paint avatars who could navigate their own foibles and fictions. After Marcel Duchamp’s defection to the United States during World War I, he developed a female alter ego named Rrose Sélavy who existed in photographic portraits made with Man Ray, as a brand ambassador for a non-existent perfume, and as a fictive author of a number of conceptual artworks produced during the 1920s. By the interwar period, the impulse toward pluralist personae raced into every direction of art, literature, media, and pop culture—among those burgeoning tactics, women like Tarpé Mills, Gladys Parker, and, a few decades on, Cathy Guisewite developed comic strips starring characters distinguished only by degrees from themselves. Not exactly autobiographical, Mills’ Miss Fury, Parker’s Flapper Fanny, and Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy were experimental incarnations that blended fantasy and reality on the comic’s page.

In these times, the ‘another hero’ we need is unequivocally a shero: she appears from between pages of comics, frames of VFX televisual candy, spinning on the vinyl of queer nightlife, and spilling from the indulgently decadent missives of contemporary painting as a transposition of restless, fragmented feminine signifiers that refuse to organize monolithically or behave moralistically. What in yesteryear began as secret identities for superheroines like Lynda Carter’s spinning firework transformation into Wonder Woman on the eponymous TV show in the mid-1970s (and the re-re-re-iteration of that transformation sequence in Dara Birnbaum’s famous Technology/Transformation video artwork a few years later has mutated in the rhetoric of its outrage, skewing more and more toward paranormal, outright monstrosity in the construction of alternate, more liberatory social outcomes. The hissing refusals of Elsa Lanchester in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein (directed by notable queer James Whale) anticipated a rogues’ gallery of monster women with more or less explicit feminist agendas, among them Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body, 2009; Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, 2024; and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, 2026, which reincarnates the Bride of Frankenstein nearly a century on in an experimental vaudevillian noir thriller haunted by the specter of Mary Shelley herself.

Here there be monsters, but key to the movement is an appreciation of how the monstrous serves to taxonomize the non-normative vis-a-vis the dominant social order. Whatever is unknown, other, queer gets framed as monstrous, garnering abject disavowal and alienation. Women become monstrous to the patriarchy when they—we—are educated and enterprising, when they age, when they couple with other women, when they demonstrate interiority, emote, menstruate, when they dress for themselves, when they vote, when they desire. Bimbos present a particular and present danger, as blonde bombshells, balloon boobies, manic pixie dreamers, video hos, streetwalkers, and bad girls are wrested away from porno search terms in male-gaze pipe dreams. The bimbo as an archetype emerges out of the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements from the constraints of post-war suburban domesticity into a culture of oral contraceptives, abortion access, and progressive shifts in fashion, the workforce, and how the lives of celebrities and public figures were reported. The advent of Barbie and other dollifications of adult womanhood complicated the longstanding conventions of baby dolls (and women as objects and property), and was followed by a decade that saw increased legal protections for nudity and pornography: the consumption of women is a crucial precursor for the bimbo, composited from sex dolls and mudflap pinup ladies, franchises like Girls Gone Wild and Baywatch, and the aesthetic progeny of Anna Nicole Smith. The allure of Lana Del Rey’s vapid provocations, the raw destructive potential of Bridezillas, and a veritable phalanx of Real Housewives populate a complex field of desire and action into which the bimbo re-emerges.

The bimbo may seem like an unlikely liberator, mostly because she has typically bypassed liberation in favor of the artificial flavors of spontaneity, outrageousness, and debauchery for the amusement of male spectators. But the redirection of her exaggerated features toward vapid critiques of status quo social orders, her own self-possessed coquettish misandry, and, most of all, misbehavior with intent yields productive upsets to structural power relations.

This reprisal of bimbo can be found bursting forth in undulating piles of hot pink limbs, boob jobs, and gnashing teeth in Cassidy Ott’s newest paintings, which were on view in her solo exhibition Back By Popular Demand! at No Instructions Gallery in Milwaukee, WI, through May 29th. Each acrylic on canvas painting—ranging from the scale of centerfold to marquee signage—roils with the antics of Sharkie, a rose-tinted cryptid that might be spotted on a tabloid in the gyno waiting room in a Celeste Rapone painting. And in excess of each painting’s imagery, accompanying wall texts experiment with the didactic in the expanded field,  reading like diaristic excerpts, sissy rap lyrics, and scratchpad brainstorming annotations.

Sharkie is what happens if Marvel’s Venom symbiote crashed to earth and melded with an aspiring party girl instead of the usual fare of superhero dude characters. A series of high camp tableau—backyard cookout, pool party, casino, and carpeted dens hung with Playboy posters—serve as backdrops for a fluorescent magenta anti-heroine possessed of Loony Toons morphology, adjacent to mythologic chimerical creatures, gorgons, and harpies. Undulating around the central character, what appears to be her tongue released from between pointed lines of teeth spirals to the edges of the composition in a chutes-and-ladders maze of glossolalic oral fixation. Sharkie’s adventures zigzag between base instinct and impulse control, with wide, wet black eyes peering with maximum anxiety and stimulation. Sharkie is to Keith Haring’s dog motif what the Wimmen’s Comix were to R. Crumb: high femme rebuttals to cartoon mainstays, mispronounced into troubled entanglements spread across psychic life, consumer culture, and convulsive biopolitics. In a limited edition comic zine that Ott produced in conjunction with her exhibition of paintings, the artist joins up to the traditions of women and their avatars in comics aforementioned, staging Sharkie to share backstories to some of the paintings on view, examine the contours of vulgar sentiments, recount nightmares, meditate on zen pronouncements, and speculate on existential musings like, “I wonder if that’s how men feel.”

Ott typically depicts Sharkie with hourglass curves and high gloss, buxom tits juxtaposed with the character’s creature-feature head, lolling mouth agape. At other times, Sharkie extends Stretch Armstrong-style as an unruly “body without organs.” Just as often enough, Sharkie presents with ‘weird lil’ guy’ affect, standing with stiff awkwardness and compromised self-confidence. Thongs, bikinis, and novelty t-shirts costume these doodles-come-alive. Sharkie serves as an avatar, perhaps as much for viewers as for the painter herself, running simulations and reliving permutations on memory to examine the effects on a rubberized, changeling body whose resilience one might aspire to. Sharkie can overextend, misstep, incite mayhem, and indulge in recklessness within the virtual field of her pop-art postcard environs.

Cassidy Ott. HUBBA HUBBA BUBBA, 2026
acrylic on canvas
24″ x 18″
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
HUBBA HUBBA now THOSE are some BUBBLES babygirl! Saccharine webbing sprawled between your teeth, get you a bubblegum facial. Blow me next! Blow me next!
Chalky sweet / sticky sticky sticky / HUBBA BUBBA Bubble Tape™ / Tickle Me Elmo / Calvin Klein™ / Desperation

In HUBBA HUBBA BUBBA, 2026, Sharkie wears Calvin Klein underwear seated on a shag carpet before a Playboy poster. Her sharp pointed, harlot red mani/pedi presents as a day of self-care, but we encounter her (and her Elmo plush toy) in a lurid disaster, succumbing to suggestive strings and globs of sticky chewing gum. Webs of gum are enmeshed across the character’s open mouth, with long tendrils of the stuff running down to her bare feet. BBWQ, 2025, is considerably more violent in its implications, with a voluptuous, scantily clad Sharkie kneeling while another pink figure charcoal grills a section of her tongue. These paintings are pantomime melodramas, writhing between the possibilities that Sharkie can’t speak or else won’t. For all their comical hyperbole, Ott depicts an eschatology veering from trauma toward nihilism, employing clownish extra-human slapstick to conduct a showdown discourse on endgame gender politics. Central to the conflicts each scene spectacularizes is a crisis at the threshold of speech: the girthy muscularity of Sharkie’s extended tongue may be an instrument for expressing pent-up female fury, but the outcome always appears to hang in suspense, could as easily deteriorate into a joke about fellatio. Sharkie is repeatedly subjected to crucibles of rape culture, impossible beauty standards, economic precariousness, mania, and exhaustion. In Ott’s sugar-rush palettes and carnivalesque depictions, her protagonist/s survive in protracted ambiguities, oscillating between empowerment and compromises, gratification and debasement, pleasure and suffering. Across the painted episodes on view, I remembered a couple of sentences from an interview with scholar Andrea Long Chu: “Everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them. I think I’m prepared to defend that statement at least.”

Cassidy Ott. BBWQ, 2025
acrylic on canvas
37″ x 31″
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
Big Beautiful Woman seeks MMM (Manly Male Man) to slather her in barbeque sauce and roast her alive. What good is a pair of big hot bouncy tits if you can’t chew and digest them. BBQ sauce must be from artisan local saucery, none of that Kirkland shit. Serious Inquiries Only.
Sex / Insecurity / Self perception / Objectification / Soot / In Between Stages

It matters, too, that the Sharkie alt-reality is a painted one. The formal conventions of painting operate doubly as emotional metaphor, with the edges of the canvas rectangle compressing their contents like a pressure-cooker. Episodes of near pictorial flatness bend into forced perspectives redolent of Fra Angelico, traced out in hire-wire color clashes that build into neo-Fauve cacophonies like those found in paintings by Elizabeth Murray or Katherine Bernhardt. Enlarging the scope of the flat, milky qualities found in hand-painted cel animation, Ott gets playful with the trappings of the commercial arts, staging linguistic arcades and panoplies of logos and signs around her thotty pink creatures that string together memes, witticisms, and branding, presented as self-deprecating humor and art historical puns. Ott and her Sharkie both might have been birthed from Niki de Saint Phalle’s HON – en katedral (SHE – a cathedral), 1966, an early behemoth mother-monster crafted by an artist who had worked as a fashion model, gained notoriety for firing guns at paintings while wearing a superhero-esque white body suit, and created visionary successions of whimsical women characters variously erotic, ecstatic, and melancholic. Sharkie’s appendages look as if they have squirmed their way into being the suggestive squiggles of Sue Williams’ paintings—permuting the sexy-smart liveliness of drawing, doodling, and daydreaming into approaches to painting that build upon a half-century of breakthroughs in redefining womanhood per se.

Gladys Nilsson. Spark, 2023
Watercolor, gouache, graphite, colored pencil, ink, and crayon on paper
40 ¼ inches x 60 ¼ inches
© Gladys Nilsson. Courtesy of the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.

The Ott-Sharkie dynamic joins up with a dynasty of fantasists who have painted their ways toward freedom: quasi-surrealists like Frida Kahlo, Florine Stettheimer, and Gertrude Abercrombie, along with latter day role players like Hilary Harkness, Gladys Nilsson, and Chitra Ganesh. Ott’s Chicago training follows traditions of the Imagists and Hairy Who? with whom Nilsson in particular has long been affiliated: her milieu approached painting inventively, playing with sensibilities smuggled from comics, cartoons, and advertising. These inquiries take on a glaze of sly wit when wielded by Nilsson and her successors—Ott among them; tragicomic melodramas of gender politics serve as central plots in an irreverent storytelling for which Chicago painters have been celebrated for generations.

This Janus intellect of reinforcing silliness with intercitationality may be one of the central hallmarks of the liberated and liberatory bimbo avatar: within the wider culture, the performance of vacant, seductive temptress is backed by a hyper-literate referentiality, the knowing irony of a fully embodied mastermind. In the nomenclature of today’s Internet, youth, and fashion cultures, something like Marilyn Monroe’s “smart dumb blonde” is revisited with the scholarly precision of a drag queen replete with her pantheon of divas. The avatar is very much an assemblage, a rag doll, and Shelley’s monster—perhaps nowhere more legible than in pop music advancements in recent years by women, queer, and nonbinary musicians who configure highly annotated surveys of women rockers and pop mavens of the 80s, 90s, and aughts into fully immersive fantasies.

Aidan Hicks. Slayyyter, Summit Music Hall, Denver, CO, 2023
http://www.aidansvision.com.

In 2023, following the release of her album STARFUCKER, the American singer/songwriter Slayyyter, born Catherine Grace Garner, told Ira Madison III in an interview, “I have the Cathy side and I have the Slayyyter side of my personality, but I think they can both go hand in hand sometimes. The whole Slayyyter music project has given me a lot of confidence to be a little crazier. I think…some of the things I say in my music are ‘the real me,’ but it’s stuff I’m too afraid to say and act like in real life. So, I’m like, let me be a nasty whore in the music.” In the track “I Love NYC!” from STARFUCKER, the Slayyyter persona explicates some of the Jekyll/Hyde implications of the project, “Don’t bring Cathy, she’s a cunt. That bitch would embarrass us.” STARFUCKER and Slayyyter’s 2026 release WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA are vertiginous assemblages of early Gaga with gestures lifted from Pat Benatar, Kesha, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Blondie, and a kaleidoscopic plethora of po-mo, third-wave feminist facets. The connective tissue is a performative libertinism that contrasts more than extends from the lived reality of its actor.

Ashnikko. Credit: Vasso Vu, Warner Records.

Ashnikko, born Ashton Nicole Casey, is another pop musician who has literalized the shapeshifting precursors of Madonna, Beyoncé, and Britney into the alter-ego for which she has been known, along with what might be called sub-category personae, including Demidevil and Daisy. They have explained about their process, “Usually when I write all my songs I have this character that I have in mind, so this one is like this Daisy character, she’s like a vigilante and she kills rapists and she leaves behind daisies as a calling card.”

Casey’s Ashnikko’s Daisy advances the kinds of world-building possible through avatar fantasies like these.

More recently, Ashnikko has admitted, “I’m just tired of separating the two. It’s hard enough to find yourself, much less find yourself in two different roles.” And certainly in a globalized cultural economy where we are compelled to fashion ourselves into commodities, even our activity in email and social media is monetized, and we are all more or less consciously interfacing with the exposure of surveillance culture, FOMO rubbernecking, and the double-bind splitting that occurs with trying to know oneself from the outside through selfies, live feeds, and even face recognition security features, there are measurable material consequences for dislocating parts of a self into compartmentalizing personae. The ways fantasy and reality are demarcated—perhaps fallaciously treated as mutually exclusive—are really at the crux for tracing where desire resides, how longing matters and becomes matter.

Cassidy Ott. Operation / Throat Goat, 2026
acrylic on canvas
24″ x 18″
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
The ankle bone is connected to the knee bone, the knee bone is connected to some yummy slut with fat tits. Pluck the metal sigils from my supple tumid tum tum, make my flesh new. I’ll swallow up that funny bone if you put a bun in my oven.
Zzzt! / Shrapnel / Clown Surgery / Organ Map / Exploitation / Martyrdom

Viewing Cassidy Ott’s new exhibition of paintings, I was reminded of the monster bimbo alter egos that have been proliferated across recent years of music, film, and pop culture. But more than any other real-life figure, Sharkie’s expressions of anxiety and overwhelm, peering out above bouncing breasts akimbo brought to mind the recently leaked selfies and conversations Bryon Noem has had with a dominatrix named Shy Sotomayor. Bryon Noem is the husband of Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota and recently disgraced US Secretary of Homeland Security, whose policies have directed the violent, deadly, and unconstitutional policing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the United States. In the images first distributed by The Daily Mail at the end of March 2026, Bryon Noem is shown wearing a set of enormous, flesh-colored, fake breasts and pink hot pants. The pert nipples point outward asymmetrically, and the stare above them is inscrutable, shiny with the light of whatever screen before which he was seated. The Daily Mail and other outlets have reported that in a nearly decade-long relationship with Sotomayor and other sex workers he’d contracted, Noem repeatedly fantasized variations on being a “trans bimbo slut” named Crystal—language and professions verified in texts and audio recordings Sotomayor saved from their interactions.

Bryon Noem’s recent publicity has been considered noteworthy primarily because of the far right wing, religious ideologies that he and his wife espouse. The hypocrisy and double standards are disappointing, but surely not surprising given the repressive impulses integral to these types of moral fascism. The story has remained fresh in my mind mostly because of the story itself, the ways reporting has tripped over its own anxieties and snap judgements, and the pathos that the dilemma of a bimbo fantasy strikes in me. Crossdressers and transgender people are not the same, obviously. Gender variance beyond a rigid binary has been forever complicated by the uneasy disparities between fantasy and the real, with the lived, embodied transgender sense of self distinct from the performative playacting of drag or the kink and roleplay of some crossdressing expressions. But how to understand these fragmentary representations of Noem and his desires are certainly not clear and may never be made so. It’s within this capacity of the unknown that a disturbing blend of bloodlust, schadenfreude, and contradiction has shaped public response—revealing, among other things, a capacity for alienation, disgust, and cruelty in a public that might otherwise characterize itself as progressive. A payback of transference appears to fuel the punitive recourse toward Noem in the public eye: his attachment to his wife’s apparent disdain for life (of immigrants, animals, fatal victims of ICE) and hard line conservative politics has attracted a hostility I’ve witnessed over and over in several months’ worth of settings where anyone else would be granted empathy for their long, unresolved journey into gender that has been marked with shame and secrecy. The response has been derisive, dismissive, and derogatory.

It is presently unknowable if Bryon Noem is a trans woman or wants to be. But what we do know is that there have been many individuals who have explored possibilities beyond what they were assigned at birth by participating in kink communities online and IRL, by doing drag, by playing around with filters on phone pics and putting on their relatives’ makeup in locked bathrooms in order to find out what they’ve been indoctrinated to believe is unthinkable. Young trans women, yet to have access and opportunity to live as they wish, have routinely sublimated understandings of their gender through playing as female characters in video games—to live inside a virtual avatar of who they wanted to be. Right now, there are people experimenting with binding their chests, ordering their first packer to be mailed to them in discreet packaging, talking to strangers online ‘as’ someone other than who they present IRL, trying on their wife’s or their sister’s dresses when they’re alone, facetuning images of themselves. And some of those people have been raised in suppressive, conservative ideological environments, and have never experienced anything like support for their curiosities or their inklings that there might be something else in who they are or what they want. There are male-bodied people afraid that being pegged (or enjoying it) makes them gay; there are people employing sex workers partly because of the overwhelming fear of rejection from their partner and family if they were to be honest about their desires; there are people who are attempting to invent temporary, provisional, experimental images of themselves as they have never been before. An inconvenient truth about fantasy is that sometimes it is a precursor to manifesting something ‘for real.’ That is also its power to change the world.

There are, of course, branching exigencies that can be examined in the Bryon Noem incident: in what ways are his expressed desires to be “trans,” to be a “bimbo” entangled in the degradation, if not outright oppression, of the populations to which those terms may refer? What are the real consequences of Noem’s actions—how did he treat the women sex workers with whom he interacted? How do the acts of deception, no matter the contents being covered up, undermine trust with his family? One’s suffering doesn’t neutralize the ways one is complicit in causing suffering.

Still, I would love for all totally unstable (and often destabilizing) efforts to realize fantasy to be able to find and receive care as their primary context. The moral panic and condemnation that earnest or even desperate makeovers draw out of an otherwise permissive progressive society is cause for serious concern. The slide from renouncing human rights violations and war crimes into nasty jabs at body mass and orange spray tans is a dangerous lapse in ethics. Spite directed at ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ rather than rape culture is misplaced and unhelpful. The closeted bimbo may live bad politics, but the bimbo longings are something else. Slayyyter gets to be “a nasty whore” if she wants to be. Gladys Nilsson’s wriggling watercolor women test the waters with innuendo and degenerance. The Bride, as portrayed by Jessie Buckley in Gyllenhaal’s film, may refuse, resist, speak her mind, and wreak havoc against a systemic misogyny that destroyed her, resurrected her, and then brought her to further ruin. Sharkie’s fuchsia misadventures are functional fictions that hopefully make real life more livable.

The world is on fire; democracy is in ruins; just as prismatic, expansive approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality crested into the mainstream, we’ve watched in horror at the ultra-conservative corrective crackdown in an effort to maintain establishment norms. The fissures and ruptures in this worst timeline are the escape routes, detours, and redirects that fantasy affords us. Arguably, the bimbo was born from the fantasies of weak and powerful men—it’s only now she has gone rogue, darting out into fantasies of her own, thereby embodying patriarchy’s more violent inhibitions and deepest nightmares. We are living in an age when the super sheroes, monstresses, avatars, and alter egos are assembling to quake the boundaries that constrain The Real. We are writhing with hot pink possibilities of something better than all of this. Act up! Turn up the volume! Sharpen your teeth and let your tongues loll; let your nipples point wherever they want to. Misbehave.

 

The Sunday Films at the London Lesbian Film Festival 2026


London Lesbian Film Festival 2026. Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

By Adi Berardini

A local gem, The London Lesbian Film Festival is North America’s longest-running lesbian film festival and the only one of its kind in Canada. The festival is not only a full weekend of great film programming, but also includes other events such as a comedy brunch featuring comic and actor Karen Williams, and a dance at the Lamplighter Inn Crystal Ballroom. This year, the festival also had an addition of a free Common Grounds Coffee Meet-up for the sapphic film fanatics who were solo attendees.  

The Sunday films featured a longer 96-minute documentary film, Between Goodbyes, directed by Jota Mun, which follows the story of Mieke, a queer adoptee from South Korea, who was adopted by a family in the Netherlands. Mieke’s adoptive family struggled with physical disabilities, and both her father died at a young age and her mother, Willy, passed on, suddenly leaving her an orphan at the age of 14. She went on to live with her aunt and uncle; however, they weren’t prepared to take on a teenager, and she ran away at the age of 16. Mieke speaks about how she found strength and community through the church. She also found her partner, Marit, at a queer café in the Netherlands.

Mieke’s birth mother, Okgyun, felt societal pressure to place her up for adoption at the time, as she lived in poverty and already had three daughters to provide for. South Korea shared slogans at the time, such as “two is enough,” as a means of population control, and as a product of the patriarchy, girls were seen as less valuable than boys. However, Mieke’s birth family was steeped in regret and guilt over the years, and her father, Kwangho, went to great lengths to find her information to contact her as an adult.

When Mieke was 17, she found a letter in Korean addressed to her and was later reunited with her family in a Dutch airport. Mieke explains how she was not quite emotionally ready to reunite with her parents. Her birth mother was eager to touch and hold her, as she was separated immediately at birth, although Mieke was reluctant to this at first. Although Mieke was open to a relationship with her blood family, it took some time to get to know them, and she struggled with the language and cultural differences when visiting Korea after living her life in the Netherlands.

Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

What was most refreshing was that Mieke’s birth family was fully accepting of her. Although she was hesitant at first to come out to them, other than the occasional joke about her hair length being short, Mieke’s family were fully embracing of her and her partner, Marit. In the beginning, they also expressed disappointment that Marit was not on the video call. Mieke’s mother was also upset to miss their upcoming wedding. However, the film follows Mieke and Marit’s traditional Korean wedding in Korea to celebrate. Unfortunately, there was no traditional wedding venue open to hosting a same-sex marriage, but they were able to host the wedding in a photography studio.

The film’s strength is its emotional pull—there were many tears across the room. The love present within their family was radiant. However, with great love comes great grief. Very sadly, after reconnecting with her, Mieke’s sister died in a severe car accident. Although Mieke had just visited Korea for an adoptee conference, she came back after her passing for another 5 days. There was a thread of grief present that weighed heavily on Mieke’s mother, as she had felt a great sense of guilt for giving her daughter up for adoption. There is a touching scene in which Mieke forgives her mother (with the aid of a translator), and their bond is further strengthened. An important theme of the film is the difficulty of reconnecting after lost years of no contact and how this separation deeply affected Mieke’s life, sense of belonging, and identity. The film is successful in raising awareness of the 200,000 Korean adoptees who were part of a disconnected generation.

After a brief break for intermission, the next short film was Joan the Kid, an Australian short directed by Kat Silverosa and Grace Hackney. The film is about the disgruntled genderqueer high schooler, Jo, who faces punishment after wearing pants to her Catholic school’s picture day rather than the prescribed plaid skirt of the uniform. She is given detention and a 1,000-word essay based on a book of saints to write, and the principal insinuates that her scholarship is in jeopardy for breaking the rules. Jo goes to eat lunch in the school washroom and runs into an out-of-place girl, Joan, decked in makeshift chainmail. Joan comes to Jo as a symbol of Joan of Arc, the rebellious saint.

Jo gets into a squabble with her mother after she asks her what happened at school and locks herself in her room. After a somewhat unconventional history lesson from Joan, Jo begins to ask her questions; however, Joan alludes to the fact that she already knows the answer deep down. When Jo later apologizes to her mother, her mother affirms that she was accepting of her no matter what, even if she feels more comfortable wearing pants and supports her gender expression. The next day, Jo walks confidently down the schoolyard hallway in plaid shorts and sword earrings. The film highlights the fact that sometimes breaking antiquated rules is a form of justice in itself.


Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

The second short film, Calamity Jane, follows Jane, a now retired horse rider, who stepped back after a large public fall in the ring and severe injury. She connects with Nayali, who was seeking mentorship to improve her riding. Reluctant and prickly to the idea at first, Jane warms up to the idea and invites her to come to her ranch after Nayali faces a rude and dismissive man doubting her abilities. Although there is a bit of struggle at first, Jane and Nayali form a genuine connection. They get to know each other better, and yes, there’s a pillow fight trope (only with hay bales), which felt a bit contrived. Nayali inspires Jane to get back on the horse and overcome her fear and doubt. Nayali has a secret herself when she is asked for an autograph—she is somewhat of a celebrity under the name of Isabella. Although cliché at times, the film is a strong testament to the power of love and how it can support self-confidence and getting back in the ring.

Lastly, there is the short Solers United, directed by Sara Harrak, which spotlights an independent women’s football (soccer) club at risk of folding in and facing eviction. Two players, Nelly and Bills, face their own challenges in their connection when a new player, Sals, joins the team. Bills grows jealous of Sals, a blonde bombshell who steals Nelly’s attention. While facing the possibility of financial disarray, and after a couple of failed fundraising attempts that left them $200 in debt due to a broken film projector, Sals mentions the idea of practicing to get better and “not suck” at football.

Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

After one of the fundraisers, Bills walks in to see Nelly and Sals getting too cozy for comfort in the bar kitchen. Since Bills feels fondly of Nelly, their game is thrown off, and instead of passing the ball, they attempt to score and keep the ball to themselves at the expense of the team. Nelly and Bills have a conversation afterwards to repair things between them, where Bills discloses their feelings for Nelly. Nelly is understanding and seems open to exploring things further. After their loss of the game, the team is in sad spirits, however, later in the locker room, they hear the news that they’ve moved on to the next round due to the disqualification of the winning team. The ending is left open-ended, but the viewers are left with the hope that Nelly and Bills rekindle the flame in their connection.

Each year, the London Lesbian Film Festival brings high-quality lesbian-focused film programming to London, Ontario, attracting film lovers from afar for a sold-out weekend. I would recommend checking out the film festival to anyone looking to seek out lesbian-centered films and content. Especially when queer film representation has been so scarce and sapphic TV shows are often cancelled, viewing films with the rest of the lesbian community feels quite powerful and moving.

Everything Comes Back Around: In Conversation with Niloufar Fallahfar

Niloufar Fallahfar’s thesis exhibition as part of the MFA Exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Photo by Alex Nichols courtesy of the artist. 

Interview by Adi Berardini

Niloufar Fallahfar approaches painting in an inventive way—rather than as a 2D painting on the wall, she asks the viewer to engage with the work as a 3D object. Like the Möbius strip is constantly moving, Fallahfar views history as constantly ebbing and flowing. She aims to create an immersive experience for viewers, inspired by sculpture, Iranian history, and Persian architecture of domes and transitional zones. Fallahfar is inspired by the hope that Iranian Shahnameh poetry can spark during dark times and periods of tyranny. Through sparking engagement, Fallahfar articulates a practice grounded in physical and conceptual movement.

Most recently, Fallahfar’s work is on display at the Michigan State University MFA exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, from March 14 to May 17, 2026. Referencing Iranian mirror work, in her exhibition, memory, like the image, is never linear or fully accessible at once and must be assembled through shifting viewpoints and sustained attention.

Niloufar Fallahfar. Under Deep Indigo Blue. Image by the artist.

Your work asks viewers to move around it and see it from different angles. How did you first conceptualize approaching painting in a more sculptural and expanded way?

It goes back to undergrad in Iran, where I was studying painting in university. And it was around 2010 and 2011 that I created my first three-dimensional painting. I made them out of different canvases; I just put them on top of each other. I came to the conclusion that a flat surface is not enough for me, given my curiosity and the questions I wanted to explore in the art world.

I realized that the way we experience life and everything around us is closer to moving through space rather than just looking at the single image, and you don’t access it from just a single fixed point. You return to it, you circle around it, and see different parts at different times.

I feel like that is like history. We move from the past to the present while we are heading towards the future. So, in this situation, time and place play a special role in my work, and I aim to construct a situation for the audience to enter a space and move and adjust their situation in front of an artwork, which I call sculptural painting, to actively participate in the work.

I feel that, as a painter, too. Sometimes, you want to move beyond the flat surface. And I think you’ve done that so well.  As you describe, you are interested in exploring how fragments can take spatial form. Can you explain how your work is influenced by Persian cultural memory and history, especially when cultural histories can be fragmented, yet resist attempts at erasure?

I feel like that Persian cultural memory is very layered, but also very fragile at the same time in certain ways.

I grew up in Iran, and I experienced how history is constantly controlled, and because of that, I think memory doesn’t exist as a stable or continuous narrative. I feel like it survives in fragments, stories, images, architecture, poetry, and many things that we have in our culture.

And what interests me is that even when these traces of memory are suppressed, they don’t disappear; they just reappear in different forms. So, in my work, I’m not trying to reconstruct a unified historical narrative. I’m more interested in how these fragments can exist, especially in the architectural forms that I was inspired by my home country, Persian architectural forms like threshold domes and transitional spaces that we have.

This becomes a container for the fragments that I’m talking about—They hold different temporal layers at once. So, I think these works reflect this condition where memory is incomplete, and narration is inadequate. I believe it’s kind of stuttered, but it’s still active and resisted. It cannot be fully erased. We can see through history that it is reappearing again.

In my work, I’m interested in how these mythological ways of understanding events intersect with the present, and how they remain legible and deeply synchronized within contemporary experience. 

Can you expand on your influence of Iranian myths and how they are living components of cultural memory that continue to shape political imagination, such as collective resistance in the face of tyranny?

Iranian mythology, especially in the Shahnameh poem that we have, functions as more than literature. It carries part of the pattern of thinking about power, justice, and resistance. For example, as you mentioned, this story of hope and freedom is not just about the past, it’s recurring.

The mirrored structure, through its repetition, multiplicity, and capacity for confrontation, also carries the experience of fragmentation and collapse through the breaking of light itself. Within that condition, there is also the possibility of overturning what exists and moving beyond it. That idea continues to shape how people imagine political change. In my work, I’m interested in how these mythological ways of understanding events intersect with the present, and how they remain legible and deeply synchronized within contemporary experience. Myths become more than characters; they become symbols that reappear across history, through which people resist oppression and reclaim their lives, their countries, and their freedom from tyranny. So, when I use these references, I’m not just illustrating the mythology in my work. I’m activating this as a living system of meaning. That kind of continues to inform how people understand oppression and resistance today, especially in my country, Iran, where we faced a lot. To know that they can resist and ultimately overcome the darkness.

And as an Iranian, we believe that light will once again triumph over darkness in history again and again. And this is the kind of hope that we have in our Shahnameh literature and all those mythologies that we have.


Niloufar Fallahfar. Infinite Action II. Image by the artist.

That’s so important to have too. The stories and the myths that kind of give you hope in those times as well. It seems inventive how you were inspired by the Möbius strip.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe that history continuously repeats itself in different forms. In Infinite Action Number II, as well as in an earlier work titled Infinite Action, which I created in Iran, I explore this cyclical condition of history. That earlier work was also connected to a social and political subject. Here, I return once again to the form of the Möbius strip to express the idea that history moves in loops, where patterns continuously reappear across time. In Persian poetry, Hafez writes, “Be joyful, for the tyrant will never find the path home.” I incorporated this verse into Infinite Action Number II because, for many Iranians, it carries a sense of hope across generations. Throughout history, people continue to believe that oppressive structures can eventually be overcome.

What interests me about the Möbius strip is its ability to overturn the relationship between inside and outside. Within one continuous surface, a transformation occurs where interior and exterior collapse into one another, producing a third space and condition. Simultaneously, repetition, transformation, and coexistence take place. This logic strongly resonates with my understanding of history, memory, and the recurring return of myth across time. The meaning embedded in the Möbius form connects deeply with my interpretation of how myth reemerges throughout history. That is why I wanted to return to this structure once again and create a new work through it. Considering all of these ideas, I chose to place the work on a mirrored surface. The mirror not only multiplies the sense of duality, historical looping, and transformation, but also introduces the question of selfhood and confrontation with oneself through historical and mythological reflection. As viewers search for the painted imagery across the surface of the Möbius strip, they inevitably encounter their own reflection in the mirror beneath it. In this way, the present moment becomes connected to the histories and mythologies referenced within the painting itself, much like that poem.

Across the Möbius strip, viewers encounter fragmented scenes and shifting moments of life. Birds appear alongside human figures and layered imagery. A repeated female figure with flowing hair emerges across parts of the surface. Numerous lines pass through her hair, as though she is attempting to shield herself from bombardment. This work reflects experiences that many of us in Iran have lived through. More than three years ago, Mahsa Amini was killed by the government in Iran for allegedly not wearing the “proper” hijab. Following her death, protests erupted across the country. People came into the streets demanding freedom, and the government responded with violence. People were blinded, imprisoned, tortured, and executed.

I believe that when oppression reaches a certain point, when people have been suppressed for so long and experience imposed systems controlling their lives, resistance inevitably emerges. People rise to reclaim their freedom and their right to exist on their own terms. 3 years later, in January 2026, people once again returned to the streets, this time confronting the regime with even greater force and collective resistance. What I want to express through the Möbius structure is that cycles of tyranny also contain the possibility of collapse. Just as in Persian mythology, Fereydun ultimately defeats Zahhak and liberates Iran from tyranny, these historical and mythological patterns continue to resonate in the present. As an Iranian artist, I am not interested in reproducing clichés of suffering. I am far more interested in speaking about the courage and collective strength of my people.

Niloufar Fallahfar. At the Threshold. Image by the artist.

You mention being inspired by the tradition of Persian mirror work, where fragmented reflective surfaces multiply space and destabilize the image. Parts of the work become visible only through reflection, requiring the viewer to move to reconstruct the image. Can you explain more about this influence and how you connect this experience to memory itself?

Persian mirror work is very important to me, but not as a decorative sense to the audience.

What interests me is how it breaks, multiplies space, and makes everything double, and the audience can see themselves in that. In that situation, you never see a single or stable image. You see fragments, reflections, and shifting perspectives. And that experience is very close to how I think memory works.

I feel like that memory is never fully accessible as a complete image. It appears in pieces, and you have to move mentally and physically to reconstruct it. And using the mirror in my work creates a similar condition. Parts of the image are only visible through reflection, and the viewer has to move and adjust their position and piece things together to understand it.

The act of things becomes an active process when I bring the mirror into my work as a kind of situation. You become aware that what you are seeing is partial, and that meaning is something you construct through movement and attention. So, the audience can see themselves, see the fragments, and they balance everything, and in a different moment and time and space works here together.

Niloufar Fallahfar’s thesis exhibition as part of the MFA Exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Photo by Alex Nichols courtesy of the artist. 

Do you have any other artists or inspirations you’d like to discuss?

There are several influences in my work, but I think they are more related to ways of thinking about space and experience rather than direct references. Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād has been very important to me, especially in the way space moves in his miniature paintings and how the viewer experiences different moments and perspectives at the same time instead of from one fixed viewpoint. I’m also interested in artists who challenge stable perspectives and create situations where the audience becomes part of the work physically. At the same time, Persian architecture, poetry, and cultural memory deeply influence on my work. I think what interests me most is how historical forms can still remain alive within contemporary experience. I don’t want to just mention one artist, but there are several of them that shape how I think about the space and how I can create or contract a situation for people to enter, and it’s influence between contemporary practice and historical forms.

Do you have any other upcoming events or news you’d like to share?

I have a group exhibition in the Soil Gallery in Seattle in July. Afterward, in August, I will join another education program.

For my exhibition at the Broad Museum, I was working on different bodies of work developed over time during my years that I was at Michigan State University (MSU), including a sculptural painting and kinetic pieces. I’m really interested in continuing this research and expanding the scale of my work, and further exploring the relationship between movement, architecture, and collective memory.

You can find more of Niloufar Fallahfar’s work on her website and Instagram.

Leaky Boundaries: In Conversation with Isabella Covert

Isabella Covert. Surgeon _ Gestator detail, Nylon, latex, medical tubing, IV pole, IV bag, forceps, breathing simulator, 30 x 54 x 75 inches (variable), 2025.

By Adi Berardini

Painter and sculptor Isabella Covert approaches the body as a shifting site of biological, political, and material negotiation. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (BFA, 2023), she is currently an MFA Candidate and Graduate Fellowship recipient at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she continues to expand on her practice inspired by feminist theory and posthuman inquiry. Living and working in Savannah, Covert produces paintings and sculptural forms that blur the boundaries between flesh and fabrication, seduction and abjection.

Covert’s work examines “the relationship of reproducing bodies within current biopolitical frameworks,” exploring how gendered power structures contain and instrumentalize corporeality. Through entangled, unstable anatomies rendered in materials such as latex and hair, Covert constructs surrogate forms that swell and resist permanence. Inspired by the language of feminist horror films, Covert is interested in the biosynthetic approaches that intersect with the body. In her work, disgust becomes alluring, containment gives way to leakage, and the body emerges as a boundary-less site of speculative liberation, challenging the logics of collective futurity.

Adi Berardini: As you describe, the forms in your work “abstract the body and its capabilities.” How did you first become interested in the body and the abject, and exploring this in your art?

Isabella Covert: My work is very interested in the bodily ecosystems that allow space to overtly welcome and celebrate bodily excess, change, and overflow. They’re allowed to change and mutate within frameworks that are constantly changing for them, for the bodies themselves, and the people that inhabit them.  I think that in shifting towards structures that facilitate potential, there is more room for that.

This initially began for me personally with my experience of living with a progressive chronic illness, which worsens with age. So the relationship between bodily atrophy and that kind of DNA replication causing internal decay was the starting point in my work. Then it evolved into this curated lab of experiments, combined with radical political theory. And having that experience with the unknowingness of the body led to the relationship to the biopolitical structures that we exist in.

And you can see it’s very scientific, even the way you present the sculptures, too.

Yeah, they exist within a medical alternate landscape in a way. My work thinks about the fundamental impacts that a shift in perspective can have and how we can restructure institutions of medical care, but also collective mindsets to reimagine a utopian experience that regards reproduction and bodily capacities as something to facilitate rather than prevent.

Isabella Covert. Specimen Bags (preservation study) detail, Nylon, latex, specimen bags, metal hook, 52 x 7.5 inches, 2026.

Especially as women, we face issues such as medical misogyny and the dismissal of physical pain and pressures for our bodies to look a certain way with modern beauty standards. Are these veins of thought in the back of your mind as you create your work?

I think that the systems that you’re referring to are interconnected systems of thought relating to what I am discussing. I think that they’re all perpetuated by the same group of people, a small group of people with a mutual purpose and a broad spanning idea of perpetuating shame in that way.

So that’s where I’m interested in the abject and the self and the other. Within these works, I perform surgery in their innards, but also with the cosmetics of them. And so, in relation to beauty standards and cosmetic surgery, that kind of fits within the broader discussion of altering perspectives of care and how societal collective mindsets can alter and shift. Because with my work, I consider them never fully finished; they’re always aging or becoming something else. They’re fusing with one another, slicing open, stitching back together— birthing, doing, undoing, redoing. These processes reflect how we could consider bodies as a concept and the relationship to the self.

Isabella Covert. Simulated Incubation (embryonic fluid), Nylon, latex, glass specimen jar, metal connector, plastic cap, breathing simulator, 21 x 35 x 10 inches (variable), 2026.

You mention your interest in feminist reconfigurations of the body and posthuman relationships to power and reproduction. How do you materially address these concerns?

When it comes to the stitching and surgical aspect, I act as a surgeon in that way — both with synthesizing the research element of it, but also with the physicality of the materials and letting the materials evolve and age as they do. It is a process that just kind of naturally evolves in that way. I have bits and pieces and experiments (sometimes failed experiments) set to the side that I suture together. They become an amalgamation of flesh. It’s taking piles of things and then seeing what can fuse together.

I study a lot of feminist critiques that characterize the body as beyond the constructed margins that we have. I am interested in the dismantling of current patriarchal colonial pillars of power dynamics. At the core, there is the life-bearing expectation on reproducing bodies, and that’s also rooted in the state’s fear of bodily capabilities.

In post-human relationships and developments, technological developments and social relationship developments, there is the potential ability to utilize and distribute them without boundaries or biases in this utopian sense. That would entail a shift in mindset, especially about the dualism between the body and the machine. We’re at a point where there’s capitalistic misuse that we see today in those terms. It requires new modes of thinking to ensure that they don’t maintain those narratives and those eugenic perpetuations. And so much of what I research is of feminist reconfigurations, basically stating that the old tools we have used in the past won’t be useful in this sense, and they’re rendered obsolete in this era. It ties back to the saying, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” by Audre Lorde.

[I am interested in] thinking of a more pervasive system that reimagines current nuclear family orientations and dissolves those reproductive expectations that are tied to that. And also, when it comes to the familial structures, understanding kinship is not naturalistic. And instead, thinking about all gestational labor as already assisted and not “natural.”

I am thinking about potential post-human technologies and synthetic options, thinking about how we can pave a path for mutual aid structures, and just in general, less constrained family structures. In relationship to the general biopolitical structures that we exist in, the current notion is producing and reproducing as a self-replication method. And so, in this rethinking and reimagining, it shifts from self-replication to general regeneration that comes with mutual support and communal support.

In that radical rebuilding, we can understand care as wanting autonomy for others. It is a shift in mindset that I’m kind of picking at and prodding at with my work.

Isabella Covert. Incubation Spawn (ontology of abundance), Nylon, latex, hair, resin teeth, incubator, 18.25 x 33.86 x 14.13 inches, 2026.

You reference abjection, disgust, and humour as intertwined affects. How do you intentionally balance allure and repulsion in your work?

I think that in general, there is an othered nature of both reproducing bodies, but also any body that exfoliates and changes beyond constructed margins.

I think that in the current collective lens, those bodies are viewed as in “excess.” But when you consider it, aren’t we all really in excess all the time? We’re all, in a way, hosts to a myriad of bacteria, viruses, and things in our innards that we aren’t fully aware of, even when it comes to the scientific aspects. I find irony in that. And I think that’s where the humour lies. Like the leaky boundary between the thinness of skin and the insides. I kind of take that to a more nonsensical extreme version of bodily emancipation in that way. So, thinking about the self and the other and the morbid curiosity we all have, but in a colorful and playful way, that’s where the humour lies for me.

Isabella Covert. Navel Extension, Nylon, latex, hair, 12 x 9 x 64 inches, 2026.

Do you have any influences or other inspirations for your art practice?  

The area of inspiration that’s slightly more unconventional is the conversations within my work have a lot of overlap with feminist filmmaking.

Primarily French feminist films from the early to mid 2000s under the subgenre of New French Extremity. Those are something that I revisit in my research, because they see autonomy as exaggerated in a similar sense. Obviously, it’s gorier and darker in relation to what I do, but I have inspirations in prosthetic work and that hyperbolic nature of it.

The way that they depict autonomy is more monstrous and viewed through different outlets and different storytelling devices, such as cannibalism and other abject broader themes. These types of films altered the way that I view embodiment. And every time I watch them, I really do garner something new about my work and the way that their internal spaces are exhibited outward, how they tell emancipation through monstrosity in their art form, and the sequence of absurdity in their work. That’s something that I really gain inspiration from.

A lot of the discussions are symbiotic to what I’m discussing in my work. Many of the French feminist filmmakers that I study, whether they were making films in the 2000s or if they are currently making films inspired by it, are taking more neoconservative undertones from their male predecessors and, again, altering the perspective of how we engage with the world in a similar manner to what I am trying to unpack in my work.

Sometimes things that you first find unsettling can unpack a lot of important conversations. Like when it kind of holds you there and makes you process it or it lingers with you. That’s the world that I’m interested in.

Check out Isabella Covert’s MFA thesis show from April 14th to April 20th at Gallery 2424 in Savannah, GA.

Femme Demo: In Conversation with Sam Grabowska

Sam Grabowska. Surrogate, 2022, Conduit, human hair, plaster bandage, resin, exhaust pipe, polymeric sand, reclaimed lumber, moving air, warm light, 11’ x 13’ x 11’8.”

By Julia Betts

Femme Demo is a series of conversations highlighting the insights and expertise of women and LGBTQ2S+ artists. These artists share their creative experiences through discussion and then follow up with a hands-on demonstration of a process related to their work.

Sam Grabowska is a multidisciplinary artist born in San Diego, California in 1982. They currently reside and work in Denver, Colorado. Their installations, which focus mostly on sculpture, grapple with the body’s transformation and endurance in our modern society. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the SOO Visual Art Centre, and Rejmyre Art Lab are just a few of the venues in the United States and Sweden where Grabowska has displayed their artwork. Their work has been reviewed by publications such as Southwest Contemporary and The Denver Post. They have a BFA in film, a BA in environmental design, an MH in interdisciplinary humanities, and a PhD in architecture with a cognate in cultural anthropology. Grabowska founded Manifolding Labs, a firm that specializes in trauma-responsive spatial design research and consultation.

JB: Hi Sam, Thanks for talking with me today. How are you doing? Did you have a residency recently?

SG: Yes, I did. I had a six-week residency here in Denver with four other artists. I had a giant studio space, which was very exciting. I asked my friends or colleagues to be models in the space. There were five people who came, and they went into a position that felt protective to them. Then I would heat PVC pipe and bend it around them in three-dimensional form to trace their body position, kind of like 4D drawing. It was really fun, and I couldn’t have done it without that space. (see video demo).

JB: Your work seems to be collaborative and participatory in different ways, such as bending the pipes to match the human forms. Other examples include when you collected hair from audience members in Resztka or solicited responses for AI-generated environments in Intake. What is your process for working with participants? How did you start working with participants?

SG: That’s interesting because when I first think about my work, I always consider it as this very introverted process of me holed up in my own studio, having such an intimate relationship with materials and forms. There are a couple of things, though, that led to bringing in other people.

 Going back to my childhood, I was raised by two parents who are incredibly particular people and have radically different needs and desires. I learned from a young age that there’s no such thing as a universal human experience. Even when I was studying architecture, this idea of designing for everyone, this one-size-fits-all thing always seemed completely absurd to me.

In my sculptural process, I’m always thinking about making sculptures that are somewhat interpretative or representational of bodies, even though those bodies are very abstracted. And there’s an intrinsic understanding that my personal needs and positionality, literally and figuratively in this world, are specific to me. After doing one or two sculptures where I am just going from my own needs and instincts, I inevitably have a moment of asking, “but what about other bodies?”

And also getting bored with my own habits, instincts, and ways. For example, my immediate way of getting into a body posture that feels safe to me is the fetal position. Even though it’s a defensive posture, I feel safe in it. But there’s only so much you can do with tracing a fetal position. I admit that I thought, well, if I have another model come in and I ask them to take a position they find protective, they’re also going to take a fetal position. It ended up, of course, not being the case. I think I’ve worked with about 15 different people so far with tracing body postures and never once has anyone else ever gone into the fetal position. I totally thought it was a universal human thing. I’ve even gotten people who stand upright and almost confrontational.

Sam Grabowska.Sanctum for 1985, 2023, Conduit, human hair, moving air, wall, 58″ x 44″ x19.”

JB: Fight or flight.

SG:  Exactly. Fight, flight, freeze, and please. Everyone goes through these different postures, and I trace their bodies with the pipe live in the space. It’s around two hours per single 10-foot pipe to trace, to heat and form each individual segment of the pipe around a person. It’s a really time-consuming process. 

And then we sit for two hours, and inevitably something about being in that posture brings up people’s stories of either their childhood experiences or difficult events happening in their life currently.  It becomes this thematically shared experience, which I never set out to do.  I never set out for these things to be collaborative pieces. I always come from it from a place of function.

Then, there’s Resztka, which is a Polish word for little remains, little leftovers basically. Resztka is a performance in which visitors were beckoned to donate snippets of their hair, which I sewed onto my shroud.  An AI-assisted generated video played back memories of my grandparents’ experiences in Poland before, during, and after WWII.

Many cultures have rituals around hair cutting, saving, weaving, or burning. To me, there’s something intimate about our hair.  Of course, on an almost forensic level, it carries our DNA. I’ve had resistance from certain participants who are worried about leaving a hair that has DNA in it, which I think is a very reasonable concern. They’re wondering, “What are you going to do with my hair? Is it going to be planted [at a crime scene] somewhere?” With those people’s experiences in their lives of being policed, there is an understandable concern about bodily autonomy and control. That’s really intimate and vulnerable.  I always respect that, and I never require anyone to do anything. With my next piece involving hair, I’m going to have them put their hair in a mini-incendiary device instead of donating it.

Sam Grabowska.Resztka, 2022, Cold War Era Polish Army coat, mesh fabric, conduit, shepherd’s bell, shepherd’s shears, sinew, human hair, AI-assisted video, grandparents’ stories, conduit, paint, visitors, Hejnał trumpet call, dimensions variable.

JB: Your practice involves working with people, but also institutions. How does your artwork relate to the space it inhabits?

SG: Because of my background in architecture and my own sensory hypersensitivity, I’ve always been interested in the built environment, and its failure to make me personally feel okay, especially American architecture. The built environment in the States has been at the forefront of my experience, especially made by developers who privilege economics over lived experience.

In my sculptural process, I don’t ever start with a very clear idea or concept. But I’ve always felt that architecture is an institutional failure. How does the body exist and survive in this environment? I also often think of humans as apes in self-captivity. We are self-captive in our built environment. That’s how it feels to me; it doesn’t feel like these nests or hives or the way that other animals create their shelter. It seems like it’s so controlled and hierarchical, not that other animals don’t have that per se in certain places, but it seems like it’s in our human animal hood.

Then, of course, things like walls, floors, ceilings, thresholds, doorways, and windows, those are all interesting architectural elements for me to explore. I think about how a body, a life, and a lived experience relate to those architectural elements.

In my interactive digital installation called Intake, there are different visual and audio components layered on top of another. It is centered on the domains of psychological care and psychogeography. Visitors fill out an ‘intake form’ on a tablet and this input generates a custom mixed-reality environment that projects onto a screen. Each visitor, when they input different combinations of these five elements, will have a unique output so that they can choose their own place to rest or feel safe or play in. You have five elements, but then you have different ways that they can combine, so you have far more than five choices because they multiply into many combinations. The visitors go behind the screen, casting their own shadow. A camera records this shadow play and rebroadcasts it on a monitor at the front of the gallery as an archive of all the people and their custom environments that came before.

Sam Grabowska.Intake, 2023, AI-assisted video, 3D models, computer program, text, soundscapes, visitors’ shadows, video camera, motion sensor, screen, tablet, approx. 12’ x 15’ x 15.’

JB: I also want to get back to the sculptures that go into these environments. You work a lot with these skin-like surfaces. I was thinking about how skin is a memory holder. It contains history, like scars. It can remind us of past traumas that happen to the body, or wrinkles and age. Skin can remind you of your whole life that’s gone by. What does skin mean to you? 


 SG: First of all, I think both hair and skin tend to show age and trauma. I’ve always been interested in that since I was eight years old, every time there’s a huge trauma in my life, I get another gray hair. I’ve always had gray hair throughout my entire life. Hair is a symbol of the life being sucked out of you, the color being taken out of the core of the hair, and turning silver or grey.

I think you’re absolutely right about skin. Many difficult experiences in my personal life have involved types of emotional abuse. And there’s also something about trying to seek proof of the damage that was done. When I have physical injuries, there are scars. There is a way to show other people that an event happened. Whereas with things that are more psychological in nature, I think for many of us it’s difficult,  especially if it happened at a young age and we were denied our reality. There weren’t any witnesses other than the perpetrators to what was happening to us. In my work, there is this need to get at that proof, or trace of existence.

Sam Grabowska. Hide of an Endangered Species, 2024, Plastic, sinew, moving air, 30” x 27.”

JB: How did you end up depicting skin in your work?

SG: I came to use this skin-like material in a roundabout way. I was a visiting teacher for a middle school/high school. I was working for a semester with them on a group art class project, and a lot of it was asking what they wanted to do, trying to combine their different material interests, experiences, and desires. As a group, we came up with this project that they wanted to make: a large dress that also dealt with the American dream. I was thinking about material for this dress and about how a lot of these students are underserved and children of immigrants, like I was.  What is the readily available material that I can show them? The bag hutch seems to be pretty universal for many people, but especially people who grew up in lower-income families and children of immigrants, where everything is saved and reused a million times. I thought, I bet it’s the same for this generation. Sure enough, they had tons of grocery bags. Our great friend YouTube showed me these craft projects where people are making fabric or weaving using plastic bags. You use these irons to heat plastic bags, and they can make fabric out of it. It was a lovely, interesting project. It ended up being a pretty large installation. During the making of the piece, there was a table full of young men who had a very binary relationship to their gender, and they were resistant to using an iron.

JB: Oh, it was too feminine to them?

SG: It’s a domestic feminine task to them. I was trying to explain to them that it’s literally a power tool. It is plugged in. It works at a higher power than you could ever do with your hands. I told them to play with it like a power tool. In trying to demonstrate to one another that they didn’t have an ounce of whatever they were viewing as feminine care or grace, they were slamming the iron down full heat onto the plastic bag and melting it. It took a couple of days for them to get comfortable with one another and with the process to start to not burn the hell out of it, which is also an interesting experiment in and of itself. I wasn’t making the experiment. They were cultivating the experiment with themselves.  In this burning, I was looking at it and I thought, oh this looks crazy. It looks like skin tears. It reminded me a lot of the culture of alien cosplay, or skin gashes from comic books, where there’s this really over-the-top mutated skin. I was thinking, “Is this a material I could control and make otherworldly? And have the material turn into something that would be uncanny?”

After that whole semester was done, I started playing with plastic bags in my studio with a lot of different heat-treating processes and trying to figure out what I needed to control and how to create this skin-like texture. Then it was about figuring out what form it wanted to be. So, it was a material-first discovery. It was very much seeing the material, being curious about it, working with it, and being attracted to it.  It was this highly synthetic thing that is toxic to skin and bodies. I need to wear full PPE during the process of heating the plastic. It is so foreign to our bodies and yet I can cut it into approximating an object that has a visceral connotation of being bodily.

JB: There are all these different pushes and pulls that you’re discussing, these contradictions that really interest me. I think there’s a lot of attraction and repulsion happening in your work.

SG: Yes, there’s attraction and repulsion. There’s a lot of what I call yuck and yum. I often do that. 

If you’re out camping without showering for awhile and you rub your finger behind your ear, there’s such an intense smell. It’s disgusting, and yet it’s so you that there’s a narcissistic attraction to the smell. You’re totally enamored at the same time because it’s so intimately you. Or when I brush my cat, she loves smelling her own fur and will try to eat it. I feel like there’s something weird, cannibalistic, or obsessive about that.

It’s a foreign substance. It’s the bacteria that’s making it smell a particular way. It’s very much out of the environment of your own body that produces it. It becomes intimate because it is particular to the way that your own psychology and body have processed that thing. It becomes distinctly yours even though you didn’t necessarily choose it. It has this seductive quality because it has been processed through you and is so related to you, however foreign at the same time. There’s something magical about that.  I’m not a parent, but when I think of the process of carrying a child and birthing a child, the child is very much of yourself, while also a separate thing. There is an obsessive adoration of that thing, of that person, of that entity. It is absolutely 100% of you and 100% foreign at the same time.


 JB: Another contradiction that your sculptures make me think about is resilience versus fragility. Your sculptures are fragile and torn, yet they also have survived so much. Those qualities can be both physical and psychic, trauma can take place on both the mind and the body. It reminds me of how trauma can build resilience but also be debilitating. Is that something you are also considering?

SG:  Absolutely. Recently, one of my dear friends, Katie, and I were discussing what if I had been born in Poland?

My parents are both from Poland. They came over here, and then the borders closed behind them because of Communist occupation. They couldn’t go back, so then I was born here [in the US], not in Poland. My dad had to find a job and had to get a visa under complete duress and political emergency. By the time the borders opened, my parents had already had to start this new life here in the States. I often think about what it would have been like had I been born in Poland. The year that I was born, it was martial law. There were curfews in place for everyone in the whole country. The city, Wroclaw, where my parents were from, was completely under lockdown, patrolled by an army in the streets. My grandparents and my parents had to adapt to it. You were saying, there’s resistance, and then there’s a lot of adaptation. It’s survival.  And also, the maladaptation. It’s a survival mechanism at first, and then it starts harming you.

Katie and I were having a dream session imagining who we would have been if our families and childhoods were different. Or do the obstacles make the person?  There are myths that who we are is innate and will come out regardless of whether or not we have adversity or not. It’s a chicken or egg question that a lot of people consider.

Sam Grabowska. Remote Sensing, 2024, Conduit, insulation, plastic, concrete, dimensions variable [as pictured, approximately 10’ x 13’ x 8.’


 JB: I really feel those influences in your sculptures. Would you agree?

SG: Yes, I very much hope so. I think it is something that I’m always thinking about.

But also, when I’m making work, I’m always worried about the work being too literal or being taken as one thing only. When I’m in the process of making something, if it feels too grotesque or too violent, then I’m going to immediately ease back off or add another component to balance or contradict. If an object is becoming extremely grotesque, then I’ll add an aspect that is alluring, beautiful, intimate, or shiny in it.

I also wonder about the term “trauma” in talking about my own work, too, how much it is used and how people use it. It is an element of my work, but I’m also worried about it being a primary vocabulary word.

JB: It’s a really loaded word. Whenever someone hears the word trauma, people tend to just directly talk about that, and they won’t discuss other things happening in the work.

SG: Yes. Thank you. It can be a useful shorthand, but many people use the word in very different ways. I think, in this current zeitgeist in particular, trauma seems to be a weird, loaded term. I still am using the word trauma. I’m trying to think of all negative experiences or abuse. I haven’t found a poetic way to necessarily recapture the gist of what I mean when I think of trauma in the body or emotional trauma.

JB: Speaking of unclassifiability, I noticed this dynamic between figuration and abstraction in your work. The materials remind me of the body, but the forms are very open-ended. It reminds me of the unclassifiability of the body in that they don’t have these specific identity markers. It reminds me of body fluidity. Is that something that you’re also thinking about?

SG: Yes. That goes back to fear of being too literal or too figurative. I do like the more subconscious projection of a body into the sculpture, where you might not see the body that I trace. I think there’s something subconscious and proprioceptive that happens in our bodies where you immediately intuit that you could fit inside it or understand it’s to your scale. In terms of the body and abstraction, I have an allergy to having it look like one body because my body cannot stand in for anyone’s body, and no one else’s body can stand in for mine.

 I used to work a lot in photography for a decade or so.  When I would take photographs of installations and they had humans in it, they always had to be nude to me, because as soon as there was clothing on it, there was time and subculture. There were so many things layered into clothing. I wanted the nude form as something that was human and out of culture.

At the same time, with these sculptures, I was also thinking about race, identity, and culture, and that’s important in my work. And yet it takes place behind the curtain. It’s behind 20 curtains. Because I don’t discuss it in my artist statement.  I don’t talk about it on title cards, and things like that, either. However, all of the models I choose come from historically marginalized identities or an intersection of many of those identities. When I’m tracing their body postures, the body postures they choose seem particular to the person and their gendered, racial, class, and cultural experiences. Nevertheless, I understand it’s so abstracted that I would never expect a viewer to see or feel their specific identities, nor do I necessarily want to tell the viewer to inform it. It’s odd. I don’t quite know where that starts to layer in yet, but I feel like the unique particularity and the identity of the people who I trace is very important.

JB: The abstractness of the sculptures relates to the fluidness of identity. Identity can’t be controlled or pinned down.  It really supports that.

SG: I love that. There is something weird about anonymity, where it can go either way.

It can be a universal erasure, making everything to the experience of the European man, everything is at that scale and experience. There’s a great deal of violence that comes out of the idea that the universal human is the six-foot-tall, white, Vitruvian man.

On the other hand, anonymity can be so incredibly freeing because so many of us want to be ourselves- our weird layers of infinite variables – and not be perceived or judged. We’re this weird accumulation of millions of atoms and an odd configuration due to our particular course in life.

There’s something again annoyingly twofold with anonymity. I do hope that there is something about the extreme abstraction of my work that hopefully opens the door to anyone. I hope that the intense intimacy in the process of making and forming it will subconsciously connect to that extreme reality of experiences.

JB: What would you like to do for your demo?

JB: Thank you for speaking with me today!

Check out more of Sam’s work on their website and Instagram. See their work currently on view in the group exhibition “The Search For Radiance in the Grotesque” at Zane Bennett Contemporary in Santa Fe, up until April 4th.

I Feel That Way Too, Too

i feel that way too by jaz papadopoulos. Image courtesy of Nightwood Editions.

i feel that way too
jaz papadopoulos
Nightwood Editions, 2024


Reviewed by Erin Kirsh

jaz papadopoulos’ debut poetry collection i feel that way too (Nightwood Editions, 2024) draws “lipliner runes for protection” and gloves up against rape culture and the pillars of disbelief, dismissal, and defense that uphold it. Broken into four sections, “The Rules”, “History of Media”, “I Feel That Way Too”, and “Epilogue”, papadopoulos studies the virology of misogynist ideologies, puts their queer shoulder to the forces that subjugate. Pulling inspiration from products marketed towards young girls, text from the Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial, Bob Hoskins’ hallucinations following the filming of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the thorny territory of memory, i feel that way too is an incantation that names, reveals, then fortifies against the many-headed harms of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cissexism.

i feel that way too asks who is considered reliable in the eyes of the public. In the section “History of Media”, papadopoulos illustrates how varying social norms and legal definitions have often meant that the news and the courts have demonstrated profound bias against those coming forward to seek justice. The poem “Lesson 2: Language” lays bare how victims of sexual assault have been labeled untrustworthy, conniving, or simply beneath caring about in order to uphold structures of power:

“until 1983 in Canada, any attempt to levy a charge of rape against a spouse would be ignored, thrown out, or tallied under the statistic of ‘false allegation’ since, after all, it is legally and linguistically impossible for a husband to rape his wife.

A false allegation here, there, another. Ah, yes, women: they are slick with lies, aren’t they.”[1]

Expanding this exploration, in “Lesson 3: Circulation,” the speaker asserts:

“It is impossible for anything shaped as a woman
to be well understood
especially in public.”

It isn’t just the public being examined in papadopoulos’ collection. The poems of i feel that way too dwell as much in the kingdom of the internal as they do the external, and the speaker themself is not above their own investigation. From the section “I Feel That Way Too,” the author quotes artist Adriana Disman from their performance art piece “care work (who cares?)”:

“Do you ever feel like violence and desire
are so closely intertwined you don’t know
what you want?”[3]

Here, there is a courageous subtextual question: Is it possible to empower and harm ourselves at the same time? How perfectly can we rely on ourselves to navigate these unsafe, entrenched societal networks without doing ourselves damage? This can be a frightening line of inquiry. There are those who would pounce on the opportunity to ascribe blame to a victim for questioning themself. Many would distort and pervert this responsible introspection into a mea culpa. From “The Rules”:

“Your confessions…
reluctance
eagerness
embarrassment

can and will
be used
against you.”[4]


One of the most heartbreaking threads in i feel that way too is the seeming impossibility of a clean escape from bias and enshrined violence. In sections that delve into the speaker’s past, readers are shown that ours is such a culture of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ciscentrism that many young women and AFAB people are taught that efforts to kick back at harmful conventions should be met with derision. We learn it is safest and most acceptable to force ourselves into shapes and personas that don’t fit for the benefit of social belonging. From the section “I Feel That Way Too,” there is this wonderfully loaded stanza:

“I tell the other girls I’ve been invited
to be a model but my feminist mother is ruining my life.
She writes No Barbies Please
on birthday invitations, wipes my Bubble Gum
Yum Yum lip gloss on her sleeve. No lip colour,
no nail polish, no TV. Only rural Manitoba granite”[5]

It could be tempting to read this passage merely as an adolescent ignoring the wisdom of their mother, but there’s more here. In these ideas shuttled from mother to child, in this parent’s attempt to ward her “daughter” against the limiting, flattening, and otherwise hostile strictures of gender roles for women that she herself has had to contend with, there is also a demonization of that which traditionally belongs to the realm of the femme. Because things like lip gloss and Barbies have been foisted on so many of us as the correct and proper things to be interested in, because of these objects’ understood alignment with patriarchal demands of women, they have been tainted, rendered irredeemable, unacceptable. And here it is, beautifully illustrated: the brutal double bind in this resistance, this genuine act of motherly care. There’s nothing wrong with lipstick (the speaker later employs it on their own terms as a method of spiritual shielding), there’s no nefarious agenda in nail polish, and there is joy (so much joy!) to be found in Barbies. In our efforts to liberate ourselves from patriarchy, it’s easy to end up taking aim not against violent systems, but that which is linked (whether inherently or through socialization) to the feminine.

In addition to the strengths, knowledge, love, and bravery we gain from our forebears, there is a necessarily double-edged quality to what a child inherits from their mother in a woman-hating society.


“Everything that can be said about beauty
can also be said about pain.
…
Mom shrinks her body
with her teeth, pares nail beds
like potatoes. I will never be like that,
I think, but somewhere a hole licks its lips”[6]

There is no bruiseless extraction from these pervasive, oppressive systems. Our best attempts may bear barbs, but what is worthier than the pursuit of agency, of personal and collective safety?

i feel that way too is a book with so much to it that to read it only once would be a mistake. This book is the kindest kind of protector: it hears you. Tells you. Holds you. It is a work to revisit over and over again.

[1] jaz papadopoulos, i feel that way too, (Nightwood Editions, 2024), 17.

[2] jaz papadopoulos, i feel that way too, (Nightwood Editions, 2024), 18.

[3] Adriana Disman, “care work (who cares?)” as performed at the LIVE! Biennale in Vancouver, Canada in 2019, quoted in jaz papadopoulos, i feel that way too (Nightwood Editions, 2025), 80.

[4] jaz papadopoulos, i feel that way too, (Nightwood Editions, 2024), 10.

[5] jaz papadopoulos, i feel that way too, (Nightwood Editions, 2024), 61.

[6] jaz papadopoulos, i feel that way too, (Nightwood Editions, 2024), 51–52.

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang at The Polygon Gallery

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang. Installation photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of The Polygon Gallery.

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang

The Polygon Gallery

Nov. 28, 2025 – Mar. 29, 2026

By EA Douglas

Busting off the walls ready to steal your attention, the works included in Charlotte Zhang’s Tireslashers at The Polygon Gallery are bright, bold, and confronting. Uniting two of Zhang’s ongoing projects, Rogue Pamphlets, a series of large textile collages, and Bloodsport/Playground Rules, a handpicked selection of “readymade” sculptures lifted from public property, the exhibit brings under scrutiny the historical and contemporary construct of the loveable outlaw.


Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang. Installation photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of The Polygon Gallery.

The hand-sewn wall hangings of Rogue Pamphlets are composed of images of ruffians and rogues, pulled from historical and contemporary sources, and transferred onto shiny, polyester patches, using the sublimation dye technique. The pictures have been carefully cut out, then basted with large, loose stitches, one on top of another, piled up to the point of convergence. The Rogue Pamphlets seem to play with the act of installation: the tension of the backing fabrics held against the gallery walls causes the images to ripple and pucker, the brightness of the lighting bouncing against the polyester sheen, further distorting the pictures. The visual impact is stunning.


Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang. Installation photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of The Polygon Gallery.

Romance Scammers (Gyges – Lyndon) is the largest and most impressive piece of the group. The work juxtaposes the naked Nyssia from William Etty’s Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed (1830) with a rising Lady Columbia, the female personification of the United States. Various versions of these historical heroines are stitched onto two blue stretches of fabric, interspersed with images pulled from surveillance cameras of pickpockets, and foregrounded by a film still of a just-about-to-happen kiss from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). The assemblage brings together seducers, rakes, gold diggers, and America’s self-concept of nationhood, forcing the question of similitude.

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang. Opening reception photo by Alison Boulier. Photo courtesy of The Polygon Gallery.

The other standouts are Evasive Theatrics I (Irma Vep, the malevolent Other) and Evasive Theatrics II (Executioners and interrogated subjects), a duo of laser lemon yellow squares highlighting the roles of the femme fatale and the executioner, in turn, exploring the commonality of characters donning masks. Evasive Theatrics I (Irma Vep, the malevolent Other) features women’s bodies in black latex, reduced to only their eyes, with a snarling Musidora, pulled from Louis Feuillade’s seven-hour Les Vampires (1915-16), taking front stage. Each corner is labelled with an attribution of this character, top-to-bottom, left-to-right they read: HOSTILE, FLIRTATIOUS, APOLOGIZING, FANTASIZING. Its counterpart, Evasive Theatrics II (Executioners and interrogated subjects) centers an eerie, blurred-selfie-like image of a gloating criminal, overtop which, blood sprays from a freshly decapitated body, below grinning reapers from The Purge (2013) eyelessly confront the viewer, the labelling reads: ACCUSING, DISPIRITED, JOKING, ARROGANT. Together, these two works illuminate the double-sidedness of these social constructs, how both characters are caricatured as villains while simultaneously being glorified as heroes.

Bloodsport/Playground Rules by Charlotte Zhang. Installation photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of The Polygon Gallery.

Furthering this concept of duality are the inclusion of the pieces from Zhang’s Bloodsport/Playground Rules series. Assembled across two low, bench-like plinths are thirteen metal arches in deep shades of phthalo green and navy blue. Smooth, shiny, sometimes marked with graffiti, these curved metal crests have, in some cases, been loosely locked together in pairs, or they stand solo, upright like the humps of a sea monster, or lay on their sides showing off spikey screws. It’s the screws that allude to the sculptures’ origins, with them the colourful Bondo crests were once affixed to the bus benches around L.A. A form of hostile architecture familiar to most metropolitans, to the point it has become normalized, under the guise of decoration, these simple curves of metal are a brutal way to keep people from sleeping in public spaces.  The “readymade” sculptures of Bloodsport/Playground Rules may look simple, but the affect of their inclusion in Tireslashers is distinct. Through the destruction of public property, Zhang has aligned herself with the glorified petty criminals who line the walls. Subsequently, by exhibiting these works, the art institution is thrown under the same level of scrutiny as the various entities explored in the Rogue Pamphlets series. In presenting this exhibition, the gallery has not only sanctified acts against the status quo of hostile architecture, but it has also become complicit in the crime. By placing these bench dividers on, albeit short, pedestals, the exhibition uplifts the yield of vandals’ exploits and, in turn, the acts of vandalism themselves. In doing so, the institution embodies the question that Zhang has been asking within her wall-bound pieces: who decides who is the hero and who is the villain?

The colourful works included in Tireslashers give the show the demeanour of childish playfulness while confronting serious concerns of the contemporary art audience. By pulling into parallel pieces from both Bloodsport/Playground Rules and Rogue Pamphlets, The Polygon Gallery forces us to see the picture bigger than the individual works themselves. 

A Lesbian’s Heart Is an Ocean of Secrets: A Conversation with Kitty Rauth

Power (Buried Series III), 2024. Original lighting fixture found in Grey Towers Castle basement, wiring, ground glass.
15”x15”x36”

By Matt Morris

I’m an angel…seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me?
–Djuna Barnes, Nightwood.

Sail away, sail away, sail away.
–Enya, Orinoco Flow.


Half a decade ago, Kitty Rauth (they/she) set sail from the comforts of their established art home in Philadelphia and washed ashore in Chicago, where they’ve unleashed a tempest of radical generosity, spirited discourse, and sensitively executed material inquiries into excess and loss at scales simultaneously personal and political. Upon completion of their MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they chartered their next adventure as an educator at the same institution, along with a heady mix of ambitious and frequent exhibitions of their own work, community organizing with the venerable alternative space Comfort Station in Chicago’s Logan Square, and facilitating various food and meal based happenings with their ongoing project Round Table as well as collaborations with foodie scenesters like TXA TXA CLUB.

Kitty is driven by an upbeat ‘sink or swim’ mentality across their endeavors, demonstrating an inclusive, supportive ethos that ‘rising tides lift all boats.’ They dream up futures with greater livability and pleasure for more than the status quo while integrating a circumspect problematizing of multiple pasts and histories. Last summer, when we exhibited together at LVL3 with Jacquelin Zazueta, I saw a shift in the core vocabulary of their approaches to objecthood, and the year and a half that followed has witnessed a flood of hybrid citations, technical curiosities, and well-researched expansions on discourses that their practice has centered.

Rauth’s most recent outing is Pleasure Cruise, a two-person exhibition with Ále Campos that was on display in September and October 2025 at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Centre. Together, they composed artifacts of queer life glistening from shadows and new shores. Campos offered annotations at the intersections of the sexual and social with installations of looped videos of their drag persona, Celeste, played variously from out of black plastic-curtained reconstruction of a back room gloryhole and yellow-washed urinal. Rauth complimented these vestiges with sensitive records of overwhelm, treading the waters of ecology and embodiment mapped across histories, fictions, and fantasy. Both artists have achieved lusty, heroic feats with the romantic inflections of devilish details and nuanced subtleties in a cultural moment when queerness is being abbreviated, flattened, and distorted at numerous political thresholds. I was honored to carry on some continuous conversations with Rauth about the work they prepared for Pleasure Cruise, as well as the deeper shifts in flow that have been giving shape to their studio research. What follows is compiled and condensed from those chats.


Kitty Rauth. Put Away, 2024. dimensions variable. found table, hinges, linen tablecloth, table setting for 5, ribbon.
photo credit: Lily Szymanski.

Matt Morris: While your practice spreads across myriad media and formats, ‘the object’ and its constitutive material states are often at the crux of your investigations: how are those approaches to matter, sculpture, thing-in-space useful for your articulation and analysis of desire and its capacities?

I think of your work often holding a residue of prior shifts in states of matter—melted wax candles, caramelized sugars, cast gelatins, shattered dinnerware, to note a few examples. What are the curiosities and conditions that preoccupy you at these thresholds of transformation?

In the case of your most recent works, several converging inquiries arrive at fluidity as crucial: do you interact with fluidity as a form? A mode?


Kitty Rauth: I want to tackle these first two questions together, because the concerns here are quite interwoven.

We live in the world, in uncertain times and fluctuating space, amongst real objects with real significance and human attachments. I’m concerned with objects’ and materials’ histories, and how they perform in the world. Performance in their usage, lack of usage, and inevitable state shift. I want my work to be a reminder that all things shift and change. Functionality and intention often fails, but through failure, we find change. It feels to me like a guidance, an adage, a prayer, much like Octavia Butler’s notion in Parable of the Sower that “God is change.”

All of this had recently led me to toy with the concept of fluidity. The power of undulating and/or crashing waves of a body of water, the endless overflow of a fountain, the tiniest tides in a glass of water. Truthfully, though, this water feels quite heavy. It both holds me afloat and weighs me down as I’m facing all that it holds.

Kitty Rauth. Fan Fiction, 2025. vinyl wall text. 60” x 60.”
Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim

MM: As I contemplated these liminal states, how they linger in your work, and especially interacting with your white-on-white wall vinyl piece Fan Fiction, I associated strongly to a passage of Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body that, if you and Femme Art Review will humor me, I’ll quote in snippets here, to see how you feel about it alongside your work:

No sunset m/y living one will illuminate the board where the name of your ship will be inscribed. I can tear from m/y forehead the violet bandeau that signals m/y liberty so dearly bought as for you all m/y dearest ones I ask you if you love m/e to let mm/e die one night far away in the sea…The flow becomes continuous, the foamy juice whitened in its eddies rises to the shoulders, the head emerging hair spread out, cheeks pale. Now the fingers tap continuously on the membranes. An agitation disturbs the flow of transparent juice fluid water. Abundant salty tears are shed into the flow, I drown, the water re-enters by m/y eye juice tears, in it I see blacks golds lights crystals scales…the thrust of our limbs floating on a great body of bluish lactic liquid, the water rises iodized translucent, it reaches the topmost branches of the last visible trees, it beats warmly against the legs of the swimming women, submerged up to m/y facial orifices I see that the liquid mass continues to increase with suspended mucus pearly elastic filaments, the golds the reds now have the same colour and consistence as the clouds, the rising wave debouches in the sky, farewell black continent of misery and suffering farewell ancient cities we are embarking for the shining radiant isles….
–Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body.

KR: Thank you, Matt. This feels like such a gift. This passage feels like it cracks open something that has been brewing in me with this show. The work meditates on the complications of pleasure, of what it provides, of what it distracts from, and of how it can implode on us. My personal relationship to pleasure lives in a very lesbian space— intimate, romantic, demanding, nuanced, occasionally all-encompassing, occasionally skittish. In what feels like a painful opposition to queer celebrations of pleasure, I am sometimes terrified of the way it can and has drowned us, and Wittig seems to have captured this complication so beautifully and poetically. I will be sitting on this for some time.

MM: There are a number of related critical facets in this fluidity that I want to tick off: annotate however you might associate and expand on them.

Wet.

KR: In the same breath, sensuous and miserable. Dripping, cold.


MM: Melt.

KR: Slow decay, disappearance, but also how you feel in love.

MM: Drown.

KR: Overwhelmed, all-encompassing, endless.


“I’ll never let go, Jack.”

MM: Overflow.

KR: Abundance, excess, indulgence.

Also,

A scene from Saltburn (2023) in which the Catton family is seated for a formal lunch in the wake of their son Felix’s unexpected death the night before. The curtains are drawn, bathing the dining room in a crimson light, and you watch as Felix’s sister Venetia despondently pours herself a glass of red wine, zoning out while the wine glass overflows onto the white tablecloth.

                        MM: Saltburn and Emerald Fennell’s films generally are interesting corollaries here, because they underscore the widening gap between the ways mainstream consciousness perceives sex as unmanageably perverse, bodily realities like menstruation as savage and taboo, and expressions of grief like the scene you’re mentioning as not only confounding but unmentionable, ineffable even. We enjoy the privileges of a fairly robust queer community in Chicago as a context for our goings on, but I wonder—given the cultural climate of our times—what it feels like to show work like you and Ále have done this fall? How do you perceive being perceived while demonstrating desire, queering pop culture, experimenting with legibility and visibilities as you have?

KR: Desire and our perception of sex, and how we use, interpret, or weaponize pop culture, have always been temperature checks for the political and cultural climate. You are right, we are very lucky to live and work in a community where the sexuality and queerness of the work in this show, to my knowledge, hasn’t sounded any alarm bells (not to say it wouldn’t in other iterations or with larger audiences or farther reaches, as we’ve seen in the recent censorship of Sally Mann’s work).

In this realm, my work allows some flexibility in the perceiving—yes, it’s work that engages pleasure, queer interpretations of beloved pop culture, nods to climate change, etc., but as you mention, I am playing with legibility in a way that demands attention. And I have found throughout the run of this show that, honestly, not that many people are paying attention! Those who are “in” see the work deeply and share their own experiences, anecdotes, and concerns. Those who aren’t push me back towards the former group, so that we can weather it all together.

MM: For as long as I’ve known you and your work, I’ve consistently felt an intense reckoning with loss, mortality, and death as coextensive to particularly queer modes of pleasure, care, and embodiment as you describe them, in material and in form. Can you narrate how you understand those mordant dimensions, how and why they came into your approaches to making?


KR: The first time death entered my making was through its innate connection to fatness and disability. Going into grad school, I was exploring the roots of fatphobia and found myself deeply involved in Terror Management Theory, the idea that we are always, consciously or subconsciously, trying to escape death through rules, structure, and legacy. But I grew up in a household where death was an accepted part of our story, and with a grandmother who was a death doula. For my whole adult life, I’ve been in community with legions of queer people whose shared history is so entangled with death that we have had to develop a very different and sometimes explosive relationship to pleasure and existence. The promise of death makes us choose differently, and I think my work is often living in the space of that promise.

Kitty Rauth. Belly of the Beast, a World to Unearth, 2024. Manufactured onlay, spray paint, latex paint
24”x36.”

MM: Your newest work may be the most understated I’ve seen you produce (compared to more baroque presentations in Chicago and Philadelphia) while also referring to really intense modes of affect. Were you aware of the development of this relative economy of gesture as a means of expressing some of the biggest feelings in the work to date?


KR: I have used these big flourishing motifs in my past work to point toward excess, but also because I really love those over-the-top architectural gestures that hold history and tell the complicated stories of wealth, class, abundance, et al.

Over the last year or two, I have felt a schism in myself. I don’t necessarily feel like I need “all that”- I have significantly pared down my life, my style, my social circle, and have in turn had the “Who even am I anymore?” existential bug out. But in all of these spaces, including my studio practice, it has allowed me to get to the root of the matter and focus on the one or two gestures that feel reflective of some internal reckonings. To be clear though, none of it was ever a conscious choice, but rather I think a reflection of what I’ve been developing in my 30s.

Kitty Rauth. As the water rises, 2025. Table, linen damask tablecloth, linen napkin, handblown champagne flute, fountain pump, champagne
38” x 16” x 16.” Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim

MM: With glassware of various kinds, both holding and demonstrating breach/fragmentation, containment and interiority, but also escape and leakage are operative in these works. The fountain component of As the water rises in particular calls attention to both the holding as well as the breach and overflow. Can you speak about vessels and holding, what is inside/contained?

KR: The vessels in this body of work are both drinking glasses, meant to hold liquid for consumption. As the water rises contains a champagne glass on a small, dressed table. The glass continuously overflows, pointing towards indulgence or decadence; an endless over-pouring, it is uncontrolled and unceasing. As if almost through magic or a ghostly force, it is endlessly filled. Through quieter means, the water glass in Unsinkable commands space simply through its contents. Filled with glacier water, there is ownership and a cavalier one at that. It beckons a curious, forbidden sip.

Kitty Rauth. WSL1yd. 4x scale historical recreation of White Star Line flag in linen, canvas, rope, pulley, cleat
128” x 53”, dimensions vary &
Kitty Rauth. Maiden Voyage, 2025
single-channel video 2min 30 sec loop. Cinematography and editing by Ruby Que
Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim.

MM: In the video Maiden Voyage, 2025, you ‘christen’ your own body by breaking bottles against it as is conventional for maiden voyages of sea vessels—your form becomes ship, form, and an additional vessel within this body of work, but one suggestively disoriented from biological determinisms and carrying offspring, instead embarking toward what? Doom and shipwreck? Cruising? Longing?


KR: There is an amount of not knowing involved in the nautical tradition of breaking a champagne bottle on the hull of a ship on its maiden voyage. Not knowing what’s to come, not knowing how it will go. If a ship is a body, a vessel, it holds memory and that memory takes time to accrue and embed itself. The captain may have expectations, but the vessel can’t yet understand.

For me, the gesture of breaking bottle after bottle holds a simultaneous hope and hopelessness. A prayer, almost, that things will be alright, as torturous as it feels. There is no roadmap for where we’re supposed to go from here, for how to reorient ourselves to whatever new horror is next. We’re just sailing forth towards the unknown.

                        MM: A tenet of queer life, if not existence generally, is doubt, right?

Transgressive, suppressed sexualities call attention to the total lack of a map or manual for navigating becoming ourselves. You’ve spent years noticing shifts in material states and reflecting on those in your work; it sounds like you’re approaching life transitions and change in similar ways.

Kitty Rauth. Untitled (Wilted Series #4), 2023
Manipulated found glass, houseflies
12” x 6” x 5.”

KR: It’s true. I seem to be constantly thinking about queer mapping, navigation, and orientation, and a huge looming cruise ship felt like an apt object for projection.

MM: For WSL1yd you recreated one of the flags flown above the ocean liner RMS Titanic on its first and only (incomplete) voyage. In the ways I also cite from available histories in my work, I’m very influenced by the radical interventions being made by folks like the political scientist and historical interpreter Cheyney McKnight, who revisit recorded histories and artifact as a starting place for counter-narratives that contest monolithic (and patriarchal, white supremacist, heterosexist) power structures around how we orient to past and future. In your own interpretations of the flag piece, how did fantasy and fabulation, alterity and re-interpretation come into play?


KR: This piece started as a joke with myself to create a huge red flag, a colloquial kind of warning flown on the ship itself. The White Star Line’s logo, this red flag with a white star flowing in the wind, was imprinted all over the ship, and I dug into the Titanic Museum’s archives to look for real-life representations of it. I found archival photos of an intact version made in the 1940s, which I imagine would have also flown on the Titanic. I was shocked at the size, as the original flag was only 1 yard long, a fact written onto the strip of canvas attaching it to rope. A 3’ flag for an 883’ ship was just ridiculously small to me, and the owning company’s flag display seems to me like the swinging dick of the ship, no?

While we’re on the subject of counter-narratives, though, I found this incredible piece of Black American oral folk tradition that tells the story of the sole Black man aboard the Titanic, Shine. Although Jim Crow laws barred any Black staff, crew, or passengers from boarding the Titanic, the story of Shine documents a Black crew member trying to warn the captain of the sinking ship. After being ignored, Shine escapes the sinking ship and heroically swims to land to enjoy a Seagram’s Seven at the bar while his white counterparts drown. Langston Hughes reinterpreted this into a written poem called “Shine and the Titanic”, and I was really excited to read how the ripples of this historical event have been held onto over time through storytelling amongst Black communities.

MM: The way/s you’ve used WSL1yd as a kind of architectural partition and curtain feels both very queer coded—following on curtain-like interventions by Liz Collins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Millie Wilson, Allyson Mitchell, Macon Reed, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Tom Burr, to name just a few—and also dis/orienting in the shifts in scale of the object and from the context of a ship to a gallery interior. Curtains, folds, flaps, partitions, and thresholds have some overt erotic legibilities: what did this work and its installation mean for you?


KR: I think this installation was directly in conversation with “rabbithole,” a video installed inside a glory hole by Ále Campos that sort of introduces the show. In both pieces, there is an ask for the audience to look past or move around the partition to participate in something that feels forbidden. The flag acts as a curtain to cover and mask the video of myself breaking cast sugar champagne bottles over my back while naked in a seemingly endless body of water. It felt important that the viewer is moving into a different space where they can more privately experience the work from. Rather than anonymity, it’s asking for closeness, for intimacy, for grace.

MM: It seems to me that you’ve widened the scope of your research to consider the ecological and industrial dimensions of culture, along with your sensitivities to history and myth-making, class struggle, and biopolitics, which are ongoing. One way I see you contending with all these intersectionalities is in complicating the (lost?) love object into hybrid, multiple positions. For instance, methodologies for queer love and care advance into a varied array of questions concerning environmental tourism, pleasure cruises, and not only the historical incident of the Titanic sinking in 1912, but also the interlocutor of James Cameron’s 1997 film adaptation of that event. What all were you managing together as this work came into focus?


KR: I’ve always been obsessed with the RMS Titanic and it’s sinking since I was young. Titanic (1997) was one of the first “adult” movies I can remember watching– I was 6 when it came out in theaters, and I remember my parents getting a babysitter so they could see it in theaters. I was upset that I wasn’t allowed to join, but as soon as it came out on VHS, I replayed the double-tape on my parents’ TV over and over again. While putting together the show, Ále and I spoke about the movie holding the shared space in our lives as a flashpoint for both of our sexual and romantic awakenings.

I watch this a few times a year at least and track other artists working within this history (Claudia Bitran, Dynasty Handbag, among others), although the Titanic often seems to be the butt of the joke. When I would talk to people about making work about the Titanic, they always laugh as if we all understood that Titanic art cannot be serious or at the very least, must engage camp as an overarching sensibility. At points, I even framed it this way myself because these reactions convinced me the only access point was through humor. But the work came out of me in the best way I know how.

MM: How do you think about the love, pleasure, and longing that figure into, say, sexual orientation, and how they exist in fandoms, particularly in adolescent and developmental phases of maturity?


KR: The joke that got me starting to think about gender-flipping in the short form fanfiction I wrote in conjunction with this show goes back to 2016, when I used the Femme-Butch Scale meme format (referenced below) to track my proposal that Young Leo is actually better viewed as a lesbian. I was 24, just off the peak of my deep investment in the One Direction fandom where I was reading sensual and emotional Larry Stylinson (Harry Styles x Louis Tomlinson) fanfictions written largely by 20-something lesbians. I don’t think this was a coincidence, especially since young twinks often read as gay women (lol) and was undoubtedly the way I found myself in the trenches of Online Directioners. And for me, this felt like a safe place to explore different emotional tones of queer romance while stuck in the very straight culture of my undergrad, without putting my heart on the line before I was ready.

Femme-Butch Scale: Young Leo (intervention on meme template by Kitty Rauth, 2017)

MM: I think fandoms have been a stalking horse for the parasocial turn, self-consciously so, with self-organized fan conventions starting in the 1930s and becoming more widespread in the 60s and 70s. How would you describe the experience of identifying with characters and properties in, say, Titanic?

KR: I think sometimes there is a moment when a celebrity almost becomes synonymous with the character they play, and that’s when I say, “Okay, fair game.” For me, this is “Young Leo” (who feels like a separate entity from Leonardo DiCaprio the Actor, if you follow) and Jack Dawson. With the Young Leo Femme-Butch Scale as a jumping off point, my rewatches became more and more about reading into a sapphic dynamic between Jack and Rose—the immediate attachment, the secret and forbidden love, the way Jack shows Rose a different potential for her life. And Jack’s hair!!! Simultaneously, in my own life, I was soaking in new political realities, learning ways of recognizing and interacting with the world that were so different from how I had grown up in polite east coast expectations. In a dramatic flourish of self-fantasy, I always insert myself as Rose DeWitt Bukater with Jack Dawson as my love interest. Since, I have tried to convince many trans mascs in my life to adopt his hairstyle, to varying degrees of success.

MM: How does fangrrrling and identifying in these ways relate to self-determination and the fashioning of a self?

KR: My favorite game with my BFF is assigning all of our friends’ personalities to different characters, like a never-ending Buzzfeed quiz. I am always projecting myself into pop culture. It’s hard not to imagine how I would act or react in a situation. But most of all, it is an opportunity to recognize and come to terms with aspects of myself to allow for future meditation. This way of engaging with media can be helpful in understanding oneself, figuring out what feels good and fits well, or what to shed to grow into a new version.

Kitty Rauth. Set Piece for an Institution, 2024
wood, drywall, screen-printed cotton, liquid starch, manufactured molding, sandbags, fabric
8’ x 9.5’ x 3.’

MM: I think you know this, but for our readers’ sake, I’ll again confess to you that I’ve never seen Titanic. Do you think it’s important to have done in order to be able to appreciate or understand the world you’ve been developing with it as a reference? If so, I propose pausing our exchange for me to screen it.

KR: The biggest understanding of the film one must have to really appreciate the fanfiction I wrote involves the question of whether or not the narrator is hallucinating her lover. It felt like an opportunity to question what she needs and what this short but intense relationship gave her. In the movie, Jack wins his ticket in a poker game just before the boat sets sail, so there is no record of his existence. When telling her story 85 years later, Rose is not immediately believed that he was real or that it happened. Yes, this love affair was important, but what lasted was her freedom, the way Jack showed Rose that she had agency over her own life, that things could look different, and that it was worth the sacrifice.

Regardless, I would love to host a movie night with snacks and pastries this winter so that you can truly understand. ♥️

MM: It’s a date!

Forgive me, this might be a messy thought still: I’m thinking about the resources that support queer and other dissenting, alternative approaches to living—Virginia Woolf’s 500 guineas and a room of one’s own, meaning the means and space to be who and what you want to be able to make what you need to make. I’ve been reading Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians and have been struck by how she underscores the ways notable queer women at the end of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries inherited wealth from their fathers and invested it into queer community, art, and writing from their peers, and in facilitating ways of being that went against dominant norms. Meanwhile, in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she analyzes and fabulates toward near total elisions of queer femme and trans masc people of color in modern history, with the rate of invisibility proportionate to a lack of economic means. Class, poverty, systemic racism, and criminalization mark the possibilities of supportive queer communities and the historical record of them quite differently, dependent on circumstances. Hartman’s indispensable work shows that the capacities to love and fuck and thrive persist despite the most challenging of conditions, but given the upstairs/downstairs class divides in Titanic and adjacent narratives, the tensions and subordinations within the LGBTQIA+, and the ongoing erasures of women desiring women, or even women desiring at all, I wondered if this zone of thinking figures into your inquiries.

KR: I love hearing this report back from Diana Souhami because the answer to all my inquiries is always that the lesbians are holding it down! During the run of Pleasure Cruise, I had some peers point out the stark differences of priorities within the queer community, and how proximity to privilege and power changes one’s relationship to others and to the ways in which we seek pleasure. I’m interested in the connections you’re drawing to an upstairs/downstairs dynamic in the Titanic that feels translatable to the striations of queer personhood. Those striations, or maybe more clearly letters within the LGBTQIA* alphabet, tend to react differently to power and seemingly relate via their social status within our larger society more than their economic one. Much more to think about here.

__________________________________________________


Readers can encounter more of Kitty Rauth’s work and goings on at kittyrauth.com and on Instagram @_sugarm0mmy_.

Salient Softness: To our reunited future by Rihab Essayh

Rihab Essayh

Curated by Megan Kammerer

Visual Arts Centre of Clarington

February 8, 2025 – May 4, 2025

Rihab Essayh. Still from The hymn of the warriors of love, 2022. Video, 10:12 minutes.

By Rashana Youtzy

What does it mean to endure without hardening? To persist without sacrificing softness? Moroccan-born, Montréal-based artist Rihab Essayh contemplates the challenge in their solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington. To our reunited future, curated by Megan Kammerer, focused on the ways in which Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) women come together and connect. This dynamic of gathering, resting, and nurturing through respite is a display central to healing, growth, and strength.

            Visions of sunset hues billowing in dance, the sensation of a warm grasp in one’s hands, lyrics of devotion, supplication, and convocation. Witnessing Kammerer’s curation of Essayh’s work brought about reflections on communities coming together in the spirit of love in the face of strife. One of the first examples of softness I beheld was a woven work, forming a gradient arch between two columns at the centre of the gallery. In engaging with softness via the gossamer architectural structures, Essayh encourages patrons to consider the way in which softness is at the core of the infrastructure that supports building community. Essayh’s Untitled, 2025, and A soft dwelling for sand sisters, 2025 bring a similar energy to the Nest/s, 2024, works of Do Ho Suh, recreating his London, Seoul, and New York homes in sheer textiles. Like Suh’s explorations of home, Essayh’s use of the architectural structure evokes the idea of supportive softness, comfort, and belonging as a literal manifestation.

Rihab Essayh. A soft dwelling for sand sisters, 2025. Nylon organza, horsehair, nylon threads, and dyes. 304.8 cm x 304.8 cm x 365.8 cm.

            The aforementioned works are architectural structures composed of nylon organza and horsehair, suspended from the ceiling using threads. Untitled and A soft dwelling for sand sisters are dyed a gradient of warm tones, containing pink, orange, yellow, and green. Consider the tensile strength of the wire used for the installation: fine and thin, but capable of holding the weight of the artwork in suspension. Things are as strong as you need them to be and as much as you build them — you can always build them up stronger. This sentiment extends beyond the wires to the architectural structures and the woven panels, as it relates to the connections within a community. Consider hair refusing to break or layers of paper holding a person— these things are stronger together yet considered weak and fragile on a singular level. These supports take time and work when composed together, in layers and interconnected.

            Another facet to consider is softness as an invitation, specifically within the space. Kammerer and Essayh stray from the sterility of the white cube, incorporating furnishings of comfort to enhance the gallery. Furnishings such as the drapes in the gallery with the video work, The hymn of the warriors of love, 2022, protect the screen from being exposed to external elements, bringing an atmosphere of home into the exhibition space. In this way, the drapery amplifies the comfort component, blending in with a dyed gradient to match the video. Within the space is a seating pool: cushions in organic shapes appear as sites to rest or stones to sit upon. The seating pool encourages the activity of gathering and resting among patrons. Further, the low light is beneficial for the video while also contributing to the relaxing ambience. One can rest and listen to the hymn being sung and witness the movements of the choreography. The softness can be observed in the slow movements, appearing as an external flow of the subject.

Rihab Essayh. Still from The hymn of the warriors of love, 2022. Video, 10:12 minutes. Installation, nylon organza, horsehair, nylon threads, and dyes.

            In terms of the body language of the subjects, their postures are open. The subjects in the video and within the portraits along the walls of the gallery seem to express themselves in similar movements. Having their arms stretched forward or upward eliminates the possibility of being closed off. In works such as A memory of Joy, 2025, hands are held between subjects, as each link is held within one another’s grasp. Recognizing that hand holding is a physical display of connection and of care, Essayh is overt in depicting the union formed between the subjects. Across the portraits of the Sand sister series (Muriel, 2022, Manel, 2021, and Chantal, 2021), their body language invites connection and approach.

Rihab Essayh. A Memory of Joy, 2025. Watercolour and colour pencil on wall. 188 cm x 223 cm.

            It is critical to consider the tactile component of the artworks, including the depicted materiality of the subjects’ costumes. Within the portrait series along the walls of the main gallery, there are several figures clad in a similar costume to that featured in The hymn of the warriors of love. The components of the costume include oversized sleeves with various bands, making them bunch or balloon along the arms. There are beaded adornments in the subjects’ hair, their heads varying in covered or uncovered. The same oval armour is depicted in a sheer shield over their faces, extending into a veil or hood in some portraits. The trousers are loose and tucked into boots, sometimes with kneecap coverings. Smaller details, such as gloved hands or sacks at the waist, are also included. The costumes are reminiscent of traditional outfits worn by Moroccan tbourida cavalry, substituting the battlefield for the gallery. Essayh deftly creates folds within the pants and tunics, rendering soft drapes of cloth. The translucent textiles are also pictured within the works, the same opacity of the structures, the organza wall hanging of Flower window 1, 2024, and the costuming in the video work. The effect the sheer fabric conjures thoughts of delicates and in this line of thinking, softness. It is not the thick twill of utility wear, instead resembling the materiality of Dhaka muslin.

Rihab Essayh. Sand sister, portrait of Muriel, 2022. Watercolour and colour pencil on wall. 213.5 cm x 152.5 cm.

            There are also the sounds within the space and how they relate to softness. For example, The hymn of the warriors of love is complemented by melodious singing. The song takes on the tone of a lullaby, facilitating comfort with rest. The lyrics to the song featured is woven into a panel that is placed just outside of the gallery, The hymn of the warriors of love – a poem, 2021, written in collaboration with Iranian-Canadian poet Mojeanne Behzadi. The fabric is translucent, similar to that used to create the architectural structures within the exhibition. Meanwhile, the ambient noise in the loft gallery housing A soft dwelling for sand sisters is not cacophonous, more of a brown noise to settle the mind. This facilitates relaxation through the lower frequency and bass-like sound. Considering both components of the music and the ambient sound, Essayh engages multiple senses with an approach of softness.

Rihab Essayh. The Hymn of the warriors of love – a poem, 2021, detail.

            The juxtaposition between softness and warmth against rigid sterility is clear in the main gallery space. The warm palette forms bright focal points among the white walls and fluorescent lighting. Upon entering the loft gallery, the structure of A soft dwelling for sand sisters, 2025, is an even greater contrast to the architecture of the rustic wood interior of the barn. The beams of wood have worn their years, and it shows; however, the structure from Essayh exists as something uncanny in the space. The work appears as a found wonder, complemented by the audio of the sound piece and the wind creaking against the barn housing the VAC. In this way, there are many lives lived within the same space. The VAC had given a new life to the structure that was once used for agriculture (another chapter upon the land of Indigenous peoples). Essayh then breathes another life into the space by contemplating softness in connection with SWANA women. The structure becomes a vessel for contemplation, conversation, and connection.

Rihab Essayh. A soft dwelling for sand sisters, 2025, detail.

            As a result of adapting and evolving the space to align with the vision of a soft future, there is an aversion to detachment, to rigidity. Kammerer and Essayh approach the space with the desire to foster community. Prioritizing visual, aural, and tactile experiences of softness, Essayh focuses on softness with plurality. Considering the histories of SWANA women and the internal and external challenges that are actively being combatted, this plurality is valuable in representation and the framework from which SWANA feminisms and futurisms are approached. To our reunited future promotes the idea of being lauded for being tender and soft in a world that can calcify one with cruelty. Like the stars woven into the ceiling panel of A soft dwelling for sand sisters, this constellation of softness helps one to navigate dynamics towards a future that supersedes hardness.

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years

Image of Old Cutler installation, with wall text: Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years Project Wall. Photo by Zaire Aranguren. Courtesy Bass Museum.

The Bass Museum of Art

2100 Collins Avenue

Miami Beach, FL 33139

Sep 25, 2024 – Aug 17, 2025

By Yvonne Owens

The exhibition was approached through a dark green entrance hall transformed by Rachel Feinstein into an encompassing art installation. Old Cutler (2024) is a new site-specific work commissioned by the Bass, drawing inspiration from an archival photograph of the historic thoroughfare. As viewers entered into Feinstein’s rendering of a dark, lush landscape, the entry hall gave the sense of a verdant mystical threshold experience. Journeying through the liminal space beckons the viewer into a place where (as the curatorial statement promises), “…beauty and fantasy veil potential danger and unease.” Old Cutler is the portal by which we begin to encounter the vital, indecent, burgeoning bud and bubbling rot of Feinstein’s memorial vision. The old Miami two-lane highway is lined with heavily wooded areas and mangrove jungles, reminiscent of the forbidding forests that traditionally serve as the backdrops for the darkest of fairytales. The fronds and vines and coiling, waterborne banyan trees tower and loom in a glimmering light effect.

            My own memories of the historic road are triggered by the ‘sense-surround’ effect of the wallpaper piece. At certain times of year, hordes of giant blue land crabs would migrate across Old Cutler. Claws raised, waving defiantly at the oncoming cars, they were on a mission, travelling inland to mate. Then, job done, the survivors would journey back again like a diminished army returning home, battered and scarred, sometimes with claws missing entirely. At other times, droves of giant toads could be seen hopping across the thoroughfare on their mysterious missions, en masse. The squashed remains of all manner of wild creatures would regularly coat the old country road, violently contrasting the aspirational splendour of the luxurious Deering family’s private estates that once inhabited the stretches of mangrove forest between Old Cutler and the sea (now converted into public gardens and museums). At night, the heady odours of night-blooming Jasmine, ever vying with those of vegetal rot and still darker, more fleshly decay, scented the air. The dense green growth serves as the backdrop for a phantasmagorical scene, like a surreal suburban diorama from a David Lynch movie, accented with trademark grisly and macabre close-ups. And now, of course, there are giant pythons to consider.

Rachel Feinstein, Hawaiian Wedding floor sculpture (1999), in front of Panorama of Miami mural painting on mirror (2024), with The Tourist figural sculpture from the “Angels” series (2000). Installation photo by Zaire Aranguren, courtesy Bass Museum of Art.

            Resident in New York since the early 1990s, Rachel Feinstein is best known for her baroque, fantasy-inspired sculptures and haunting fantasy realist paintings. With over two dozen group and solo showings of her work in the United States, Europe, and Asia, she was most recently featured in a thirty-year retrospective survey exhibition at the Miami Bass Museum of Art. Titled “The Miami Years,” the show focused on her experience of having grown up in America’s tropical playground during the 1970s and 80s. Fantastical and mythical and fey in the telling, the story the show relates is part memoir, part wonder tale—part homage and part beautiful freak out in response to the surreality of coming of age in Miami. “Since it’s a museum show, it has almost all borrowed older works. It’s based on my growing up in Miami, so anything related to that.” In the current show, as in a fairytale, all the elements and elementals of Feinstein’s remembered Miami dream landscape are weighing in—its landmarks, bizarre creatures, underworld denizens, and freaky lushness. Children in idyllic sub-tropical ocean-girt settings swim with dolphins. Florida kids laugh in the face of dire peril and swim with sharks, cottonmouths, barracuda, and alligators. Unsuccessful Miami wannabe drug lords swim with the fishes, though everyone in America’s Disney-esque playground nowadays struggles to keep their head above water.

            Amid a virulent miasma of political chaos, agricultural chemical run-off, toxic algae bloom infestation, and leaky decommissioned nuclear reactors (with the retired Turkey Point Energy Plant as a perfect example), the Miami scene may look idyllic. It might seem All-American, possibly even somewhat decorous on the surface, but a close-up will take you under the surface into a simmering underworld forged primarily of paradox. Wildness and decadence, amorality and innocence, sex and crime, drama and burlesque, wonder and threat exist side-by-side in equal measure in Feinstein’s vision. Extraordinary beauty and stygian grotesques vie for one’s complete attention, constantly. Growing up in 1980s Miami, the young Feinstein acted out artistically. For her medically inspired wearable art designs, she took alginate impressions of her vulva, cast them in various materials, and wore the resulting jewelry around the house. In a precocious blossoming of what would later become a performance art-based practice, she also wore them to school, to the mall, and to family dinners. Her fascination with the beautiful/terrible before-and-after photos of repaired accident victims and sequential images of remedial dermatological results, lavishly illustrated in her father’s medical books, emerged later in multi-disciplinary photo series and sculptures. Fairytale themes emerged in beguiling (if somewhat disturbing) performance art pieces. As an emerging artist, Feinstein created short films that can be described as both whimsical and terrifying.

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years Projection, Photo By Zaire Aranguren. Courtesy of Bass Museum of Art.

            Attributing the wild inventiveness of her vision to the freedoms allowed for by the near anarchy of the city’s cultural stew, Feinstein regards growing up in Miami during the 1980s and 90s as key to her artistry and imagination. She describes the beauties and the grotesqueries, cultural deprivations and social endowments alike, as boons to her darkly exotic imaginarium.“Growing up in Florida as we did, we were able to breathe as young people,” she said to me, “…it was such a lawless and fruitful time. Like the American West.” Like children in a prairie town bordering on a desert wasteland, we who grew up in Miami contemplated a vast, primordial, untrammelled space to stretch into, conceptually. A place where we could expect our voices would emerge unhindered, to grow unique and resonant—perhaps not to be ‘heard’ so much, as to echo back to us, enlarged. Only ours was different than the arid Western movie wilderness. It was one of sea, and Everglades, and social free-fall. A cultural and environmental mosh pit.

Rachel Feinstein, Far left panel, Panorama Of Miami, Detail (2024). Photo: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy of Gagosian.

            Feinstein’s exhibition includes another new site-specific commission by the Bass—a massive thirty-foot-long installation of painted mirrored wall panels, titled Panorama of Miami (2024). The mural reimagines the iconic landmarks, roadside tourist attractions, and historic locales of Miami as a rolling landscape of towering aspirations and faded glory. Contrasting the kitschiness and lux of the famed tourist Mecca, the painting includes images redolent of Old Miami and the burgeoning 20th-century tourist resort. The Vizcaya mansion (once the centrepiece of a wholly apocryphal story about how it was built as a marriage gift for a Spanish princess who never arrived, breaking the heart and spirit of the would-be groom), the Serpentarium road-side attraction (the founder of which, Bill Haas, died in 2011 at the age of one hundred years, attributing his longevity to the scores of venomous snake bites he’d endured), the Parrot Jungle (escapees from which flocked hammocks, orchards and backyards across Miami), the iconic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables (which, when it was built in 1926, held the twin distinctions of having the tallest tower in Florida, modelled on the medieval tower of the Cathedral of Seville, and the biggest pool in the world, where Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller gave swimming lessons) –all make an appearance. The Venetian Pool, the Hotel Breakwater on South Beach’s Ocean Drive, the Atlantis Condominium featured in Miami Vice, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens, and the Seaquarium also feature in Feinstein’s memorial to Miami’s storied past.

Rachel Feinstein, Parrot Guardian, in Panorama Of Miami, Detail (2024). Photo: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy of Gagosian.

            One of Feinstein’s traditional vanitas signifiers is the image of the typically hastily erected, carelessly designed faux-historic mini-mansion as an icon of conspicuous consumption. Architectural follies such as these tend to advertise newly acquired fortunes, garnered from licit or not-so-licit means, and have infiltrated old and established neighbourhoods throughout the Miami area. They cropped up with irritating frequency near Feinstein’s family home in Coral Gables, but can also be seen on Miami Beach, embedded in the stretches of mangrove forest between Old Cutler Road and the Atlantic, and amid the tropical hardwood hammock of Coconut Grove. They receive their rightful pillorying in Feinstein’s representations of the satirical “McMansions” as vain spectacle and vulgar display. Another of Feinstein’s signature motifs is the gleaming, luxury collector car icon. The car images have been part of her specialized visual vocabulary since her 2018 “Secrets” solo exhibition at Gagosian in Los Angeles. Her brilliantly polychromed, classically posturing Victoria’s Secret “Angel” sculptures also made their debut in that show. They show up here as the perfect exemplars of Miami fashion, transience, and ephemerality.

            My Miami childhood experience took place roughly two decades earlier than Feinstein’s, during the 1960s. There was no resident opera guild or ballet company. You’d have to wait for ABT or New York City Ballet to come to town (which they did only once or twice a year) and put up a show at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. During my teenage-to-early-adulthood tenure, my art club friends and I would drive regularly to Key Biscayne on school nights to skinny dip in the balmy waters off the pristine, private, white sand hotel beach. Richard Nixon was known to hang with well-known gangster, Bebe Rebozo, at the Key Biscayne Hotel of an evening. They’d get drunk together in the lounge, sing Frank Sinatra songs at the grand piano (which Nixon would play—quite well, apparently), get maudlin, talk about invading Cuba, and fantasize about assassinating Castro. (We can assume Rebozo’s organized crime-affiliated enterprises in Cuba took a hit from Castro’s Communist takeover.) Every other fledgling millionaire with a Donzi outboard ‘cigar boat’ pulled up on a trailer in their “McMansion” driveway was a drug dealer, wallowing in cocaine and armed to the teeth. The lively, lawless vibe of Miami was tangible, visceral—an integral part of the texture of the place. Feinstein’s fond memorial to her youthful haunts in the fabled, bizarre ‘Magic City’ serves as the sentinel of a bygone Miami, one receding ever more rapidly into a copper-tinted, lachrymose haze.

            In the past, the artist’s singular approach has landed on topics of: Women; women as witches; feminism; Victoria’s Secret models and their milieu; fairytales and their influential, ancient narratives;  Los Angelinos’ vanities, excesses, and conceits; and the magic and psychology of mirrors in art and history. Among the many subjects of her penetrating, fond and unsparing gaze, Feinstein’s take on Miami-of-the-past reimagines it as the bygone wild frontier of human behaviour—of angelic aspirations and primal impulses in America’s haunted playground. The cars, the McMansions, and the Victoria’s Secret fashion model-inspired sculptures function as vanitas cyphers and memento mori insignia for a disappeared world.