Tag: art | Femme Art Review

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.

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang at 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.

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.

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.

The Gift of Time: In Conversation with Holly Timpener

Holly Timpener, Our Bodies in the Pandemic, Montreal, Feminist Media Studio, 2021. Richard Mugwaneza.

By Brody Weaver

Holly Timpener is a non-binary performance artist, facilitator, and PhD Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Concordia University. Their extensive body of performance art addresses themes of trauma, resistance, and transformation, particularly as they overlap with their own lived experiences. Making use of the body, duration, and minimal materials, there is something classic and pure about the performance work that Timpener creates. In Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), where I have been living since 2018, this branch of performance art is less common than it’s more hybridized and interdisciplinary forms.

What draws me to Holly’s work are the containers they create through collaborative performance-as-research projects. Discussed in depth in this interview, Timpener has brought together more than 50 trans and non-binary artists to create performance art addressing trauma, gender, and transformation, and has managed to foster intentional spaces for their creation and reception across physical and digital space.

Pi*llOry, cleverly appropriating it’s name from a medieval device designed to secure one’s body in place for public humiliation and abuse, took place through five iterations in Toronto, Ontario (and online) between 2019 and 2020.

Epicenter Revolutions, an ongoing project forming the core of Timpener’s work as a PhD student, began in 2021 and has featured five iterations across Montréal (Quebec), Saint John (New Brunswick), Kumeyaay (San Diego), Poznań (Poland), Berlin (Germany), Mexico City (Mexico), and was recently manifested as the exhibition Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations at Eastern Bloc in partnership with Fierté Montréal (Montréal Pride).

I met Holly in the way most great connections are formed–a mutual friend saying, “Hey, I think you’d like what this person is doing. You should talk to them,” and for this, I have Grey Piitaapan Muldoon to thank.

This interview transcription is an edited version of Holly and I’s two-hour conversation, which took place on the morning of June 20th, 2025. Note that Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations is discussed here before the exhibition had taken place.

* * * * *

Brody:

To get us started, I would love to hear about how you began creating performance art. What was your catalyst?

Holly:

I danced and I went to theatre school, but I have a real problem with authority. Autonomy is a big value in my life, and I felt like it wasn’t being met in a theatre and dance context. I was searching for something where I could still perform and meld my life into the performance so that they weren’t so separate.

In 2011, I met Sylvie Tourangeau, who is one of the core members of the Montreal-based performance group called the TouVA Collective, with Victoria Stanton and Anne Bérubé. Sylvia was doing a performance workshop on Toronto Island, and it changed my life. She has been my mentor ever since. Some of the things I’ll be talking about today, I note back to this workshop, because it created my foundation as a performance artist and facilitator. When I opened the door to enter the workshop, I was hit by a wall of magic. I joined the circle with Sylvie and the other participants, and I was ready to learn skills. I was ready to learn technique, which comes from my theatre background. Sylvia’s teachings are open to letting people extend their life experiences into the art that they create. I wasn’t ready for the kind of radical openness she gave me, this permission to look inside and trust that I knew what I needed to do.

Holly Timpener, Trans Bible Readings, Saint John, Epicenter Three, 2022. Corey Negus.

Brody:

A lot of people have stories of an influential teacher, mentor, or role model who changed their path forever–it’s informative to know who influences artists in their early stages. It’s clear to me that you are a performance artist before you are an academic, and I mean that as a compliment.

Holly:

I take it as one.

Brody:

What you’re saying about performance art as an accessible entry point for theorizing about lived experience and embodiment is so powerful and real. That’s its special power, and what makes performance a unique form of art.

I want to ask you about how that formative workshop experience influenced your approach to the collaborative projects you’ve organized, called Pi*llOry and Epicenter Revolutions. Can you describe these projects for readers who may not be familiar? They’re quite expansive with multiple iterations, locations, and participating artists.

Holly:

My curiosity and techniques for performance art developed through taking part in workshops, constantly in group settings, and I found that is where I grew. Right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was craving queer and trans community, and performance community, those spaces of trust. I’ve been out for most of my life, and my experiences within these workshops were with queer people, and that’s how I developed trust and deepened relationships. Because of my history with trauma, I wanted to understand the relationship between queerness and trauma, which I had been questioning in my own art practice. Entering my master’s program, I wanted to further understand the relationship between performance and trauma, so I created Pi*llOry. Pi*llOry was an invitation for queer folks to perform trauma to shift it into something else.

I was curious how performance can help form queer networks of healing. There were five iterations of this project, with the last being online, and all of the artists who participated were shifting trauma in different ways. While I was researching, I became interested in how performance art transforms the self, not physically, but internally. Transforming trauma, and queer trauma specifically, has an impact on our internal sensations and internal experience. I was looking for existing resources focusing on the intersection of performance art and internal transformation, but I couldn’t find anything. Of course, external transformation is a huge part of performance art. They go hand in hand.

As Pi*llOry was coming to an end, I was in love with working collaboratively and feeling so fulfilled. These collaborations and groups helped get me through COVID–we were there for each other, online, and we were checking in on each other throughout the whole process. From the first iteration, we always kept in contact, and performers from previous iterations would attend the later iterations, and it was a real family. That was wonderful.

Leena Raudvee, Teetering on the Edge, Toronto Media Arts Centre, Pi*llOry One, 2019. Aedan Crooke.

I wanted to create something that could address internal transformations through performance. Thinking back to my first workshop with Sylvie, something we said every day, multiple times a day after a performance, experience, or what have you–“I was transformed.” All the time. How was that? How was that experience for you? “I was transformed.” It’s funny, looking back on it. It could be so cliche, and perhaps it was. I have no problems with cliches. If it was said so much, why could I not read anything about it? Internal transformations initiated through performance art have helped me learn so much about my own gender identity, and I suspect that other trans and non-binary artists have had the same experience.

My response was to create the project Epicenter Revolutions so that we could create a family again, and continue the family created in Pi*llOry. It started in 2021, with the last iteration happening in 2024. The project travelled to Poznan, Poland, Berlin, Germany, and Mexico City, and some participants were in Guadalajara, Mexico, and San Diego, California. We were lucky to have participants all over the world who have different experiences of gender, politically and personally, which affect their gender and internal transformations. A lot of the work addressed trauma in different ways, so it has remained a through-line between the two projects.

Brody:

Jumping back to Pi*llOry, queer performers invited queer audiences who knew they would be witnessing work intended to shift trauma. You created a semi-closed space where the performers and the audience are signing on to something specific. I think that’s key to understanding the success of Pi*llOry, and in turn Epicenter. We’ve all had experiences where we are moving around an art gallery and encounter an intense artwork that we were not prepared to see. This brings forward a conversation about emotional safety and “trigger warnings,” if you will. This is a common topic in art spaces today, to which I think a lot of old school feminists and performance artists might say, “I don’t really care about any of that. The work is meant to be an affront.” At the same time, I think the container that you’re creating is intentional and wise. Can you talk more about your practice of inviting participants and witnesses into your projects and how you approach creating that container?

Claudia Edwards, Regenesis, Pi*llOry Two, Kensington Market, Toronto, 2019. Chris Blanchnot.

Holly:

I call myself a facilitator, but it is important to me to act without any kind of hierarchy. I consider myself an equal participant in all the projects. I separate myself as the academic who has the opportunity and privilege granted to me by an institution to act as the facilitator. In both Pi*llOry and Epicenter, I put out calls for participation through social media and people who participated often helped me disseminate the call. Since performance art is quite a niche category, it was important for me that anybody who wanted to participate could be in the project, regardless of whether or not they have performed before. I never asked for a CV.

Each iteration is structured differently because it has to suit the needs of each individual. There’s a lot of flexibility and creativity in the ways the journey might manifest leading up to the event itself. I try to facilitate in an open way so that everyone feels included and encouraged to participate in the way that works for them, while maintaining a sense of community and trust. This helps the community grow and has allowed us to become close to one another. When queer folks come together and are invited to talk about their experiences, that container holds us.

The second important part is the invitation–who are we going to invite? What I’ve asked the participants of both projects to engage in is deep and sensitive work. Throughout our meetings together, we talked about traumas, our experiences with gender and developed a container of trust. How do we transfer that into inviting witnesses? The difference between an audience and a witness becomes important in this context. Where the event takes place is equally important, choosing not theatres, but locations that would instigate an environment of containment and intimacy. There is a sensitivity within performance art of knowing that the witness holds responsibility, and the spaces that we chose were important in creating that. In Pi*llOry, there wasn’t a huge call out for an audience–we invited queer witnesses, we invited people personally. To witness actively, rather than “You’re here to perform for me,” we’re creating spaces where we’re allowing each other to embody something that’s very personal.

Racquel Rowe, Washing Rice, Pi*llOry Two, Kensington Market, Toronto, 2019. Chris Blanchnot.

Brody:

Thanks for breaking that down on the back end of facilitating Pi*llOry and Epicenter. It’s valuable to document the processes that create events and showcases so that we can continually learn from one another. What you’ve shared makes me think of how these projects that you’re organizing are situated in a rich lineage of queer and trans performance culture: cabaret, drag, music, and all the oral and performative traditions that we have. Historically, who has known that these things are occurring? Who knows where to go, and when? Beyond getting the right people in the room, who shows up can have severe consequences, for example, in the case of police raids of bars and other performance spaces. In Pi*llOry, the iterations happened in Toronto, right?

Holly:

Yeah, it was all in Toronto. Except for the online iteration, which was a collaboration with GLAD Day Bookstore (the queer bookstore in Toronto), because they were administering a micro-grant program for artists to be able to continue their practices during the COVID-19 Pandemic. They were our hub, and they were able to support me with the technical aspects of the online iteration, which I am very thankful for. The artists were all in different places – Santiago Tamayo Soler and myself were in Montreal, Aisha Bentham was in Toronto, and Rahki was in Mexico.

Brody:

From my perspective as someone who began medical transition during the pandemic, I witnessed and participated in a resurgence of trans culture and embodiment that happened during that time, primarily and often by necessity, in online spaces. Both performance-as-research projects we’re discussing had at least one iteration purely online, and while someone might see that pivot as a compromise, I think that it reflects the moment in trans and non-binary culture from which they emerged.

Epicenter appears to be more complex, with iterations happening in different places across the globe. I feel like you built capacity with Pi*llOry and worked on a grander scale with Epicenter. Can you talk more about Epicenter, and break down what it was like to take your approach to different cultural and political contexts?

Holly:

Epicenter is different from Pi*llOry, particularly with how it concerns the witness and act of witnessing. I realized in my own practice: I don’t need a witness to perform. When I perform, I enter into a state of awareness with a specific intention, engaging in a kind of internal listening. I don’t need anybody to witness me to know that I have switched into a state of awareness, turning my attention focus on my own sensations.

Part of the invitation for Epicenter asked the participating artists to likewise turn inwards during performances, to listen to what is happening inside of themselves. This raises a question: do we need witnesses? In Pi*llOry, we would take turns performing one after another, aside from a few durational pieces, but in Epicenter, the works are explicitly durational. We performed for four to six hours alongside one another, engaged in internal listening in a shared space. Even though we performed individually, we came to the realization that we were also each other’s witnesses.

Holly Timpener, One Piece at a Time, Montreal, Epicenter Revolutions Two, 2022. Richard Mugwaneza.

Several Epicenter interactions took place during COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, so the question of witnesses was concerned with safety and minimizing transmission of the virus as well. The first Epicenter took place at the Montreal LGBTQ+ Centre, a large space that allowed for physical distance between performers and attendees. At this iteration, we had invigilators, which is somebody who stays with a performer throughout a durational work to watch out for physical hazards, dangers, and to help maintain our immuno-accessibility protocols.

In second Epicenter iteration, we performed in our own physical spaces: Aquarius Funkk performed in their house in Guadalajara, Grey Piitaapan Muldoon performed in a studio space in Halifax, joey eddy performed in a gallery space, and I performed in a garage. We were connected through a shared video call, not publicly available online, but projected in each place for IRL witnesses to see the different performances. We invited people to attend who we knew and trusted, but it became more about witnessing one another than having external witnesses, or an audience, so to speak. Engaged in intense inward and collective listening, we were not trying to sell seats. It wasn’t part of the process.

Grey Piitaapan Muldoon, Road Songs for Fugitives, Halifax, Epicenter Revolutions Two, 2022. Grey Piitapaan Muldoon.

However, in Poznań, possibly because there are so many people and because I was working out of a queer cafe during my time there, we did promote it more publicly in the cafe itself. If anybody wants to go to a queer hub in Poland, it’s Poznań. One of the reasons I wanted to travel with Epicenter was my curiosity about how people’s lived experiences with politics in different parts of the world have affected their gender identities and gender experiences. The participating artists and I spoke about how we felt safe inviting people from this cafe, and I had been there writing my dissertation, so I got to know some of the regulars, some of whom came to witness each performance. I think this pivot speaks to the reality that queers know how to witness queers. We know how to enter a space and understand that performing requires a great deal of care, and often we know this without being told. It’s a lovely thing about queer community that touches me and has touched both Pi*llOry and Epicenter. It felt like we were extending our family a little bit.

Brody:

The durational aspect of Epicenter is important, where you’re all performing alongside one another for an extended period. There are many art forms that break down the divide between art and life so severely that it can become hard to distinguish between the two, and durational performance is definitely one of them. It creates heightened senses, intense and sometimes painful physical sensations, and a tension between time and the body which likewise occur in different creative, spiritual, and even sexual practices. I’m curious to hear more about the relationship between the subject of internal transformation and its chosen expression in durational performance: what do you think are the ingredients that make it particularly suited for addressing the subject of internal transformation?

Holly:

I think one thing that often gets muddied is durational performance and endurance performance art. Duration has to do with time. There has to be a curiosity about what time will do to your intention. In endurance performance, it is more about pushing boundaries and borders, especially within the body, which time can influence but is not necessarily a foundational element. Over the past few years, it’s rare for me to perform anything that’s longer than four hours. I’m drawn to it because extending time pushes your boundaries of awareness and pushes your capacity to understand and meet yourself. You get bored, you get tired, you get disinterested, and you ask yourself: what is it that is making me keep going?

That is what I think is interesting, when you hit that border of, “Why am I continuing this?” That’s when magic happens, and for myself and some of the participating artists, that’s when internal transformation happens. That’s when you start uncovering new things about yourself. Time is a gift.

I connect internal transformation to gender identity because people who do not conform to binaries of gender are constantly performing different selves to fit into different social spaces, which in turn affects one’s internal sensations. It happens fast, and it’s not necessarily something that always feels pleasant. It’s tiring. It’s not something that you are often able to spend time investigating. Despite how valuable time is for self-discovery, we don’t often ask ourselves: What is this doing to me? What are these internal shifts? How is this affecting my experience of self? To experience the gift of time permits you to uncover aspects of yourself, some of which you’ll want to keep and others you’ll want to leave behind. At the same time, you might find power in meeting the edges of your own boredom, frustration, and exhaustion. It’s not always an amazing, “A-hah!” moment. It can be more like, “I have something inside of me that’s special, that’s mine, that’s unique, that’s powerful.” That can be harnessed for yourself and to support the community of people around you who are going through their own internal transformations. After doing this for five hours, radical empathy for yourself and the community of performers can rise up. Hopefully, that empathy can be transferred into other spaces beyond performance and Epicenter.

Aquarius Funkk, Untitled, Guadalajara, Mexico. Epicenter Revolutions Two, 2022. Sky Vermanei.

Beyond creating a durational performance, Epicenter was about embodying aspects of your gender identity. This was very different than Pi*llOry, where embodied trauma was the subject. In Pi*llOry, the invitation was not to relive, re-perform, or re-traumatize yourself. It was to use the space of performance to pick at and pull apart an aspect of a traumatic experience to intentionally shift it into something new. In Epicenter, each artist’s curiosity created their own performance intentions from their lived experience of gender.

Brody:

What do you think was the result of specifically looking at internal transformations of gender for the participants? It’s likely impossible to summarize with so many different artists, but if you have any examples or highlights to share, I would love to hear them.

Holly:

There was an artist in the Poznań iteration of Epicenter, Pipeq Szczęsnowicz, who performed a work where she had a trunk of clothes in front of her and wore noise-cancelling headphones. With each song that played into her ears, she would change her outfit and dance to the song. They were looking at performing different selves, and how you perform different selves, but rather than in the external world of others’ perceptions, they were celebrating the multiple selves within them that were all beautiful. Once their performance had concluded, they shared with me that they did not want to stop dancing. They did not want it to end. Through the performance, they realized that they did not get to have that amount of joy and fun in other parts of their life. I think for her, through this celebration of herself, she came to honour those parts of herself and recognize the need to find ways to continue that beyond the performance itself.

Pipeq Szczesnowicz, Untitled, Poznan, Poland, Epicenter Six, 2023. Mattia Spich.

Damaris Baker was a performer in the first Epicenter, and Damaris has had a long journey with their physical appearance as a non-binary person. They have a beard while still having a somewhat femme exterior. During COVID, they were diagnosed with breast cancer, so they were really interested in death and how it could relate to an internal listening of gender. In their performance, they had mounds of dirt, cat claws, and hair. They glued the hair onto their body, and they were singing to dirt and bones, shaking with this exterior shell of dirt and hair. They wrote about how duration was a big part of that work, and how it confronted feelings of shame. I remember they shared their intention to add hair to their body to resist others’ discomfort in their interview: “You don’t want to see hair on my body. Well, I’m going to glue more on, and how do you like that?” They told a story about a passerby who had told her that she should stay at home: “Why would you leave the house with that hair on your face?” Gluing hair on her body was a way to help lay that shame to rest.

In the fourth iteration of Epicenter, Eva Gonzales-Ruskiewicz, who performed in San Diego, also talked about experiences with shame. They did this piece where they felted an outline of their body onto pieces of a trans flag, and they decided to be topless. They felt shame during the performance, this feeling of “I’m not trans enough, my body is not going to be seen as trans enough. I’m working with this trans flag, but I have a chest that doesn’t signify trans.” In their reflection and interview, they described how they invited a few close friends and their partner as witnesses, and emphasized how they held space and witnessed as an act of care. This, they felt, helped them transform that shame through feeling held by their community.

Eva Gonzalez, Rewilding, San Diego, CA, Epicenter Four, 2022. Naomi Nadreau.

Those are some wonderful examples of how internal transformations about gender manifested through durational performance in Epicenter. Often, failure or unexpected issues can come up during a performance, and while this may feel uncomfortable at first, working through it and sticking with failure makes it easier to confront failure in everyday life.

Brody:

The examples you’ve relayed make me think of something you shared earlier–queer and trans people want to speak about their experiences, especially in a safe environment. I have a background as a facilitator as well, but primarily in social and community programming where direct conversation and verbal engagement are more common. When I’m facilitating in those spaces, I notice that there are always some attendees who don’t participate or who are not being given the right environment to serve their full presence. They might be having a hard time finding their voice or the right moment to jump in. Hearing about how you utilize performance as an arts-based method for community building and empowerment, creating the conditions for queer and trans people to see and be seen outside of the constraints of language, highlights performance as a more accessible and neurodivergent way to engage groups of people. It sounds like you’ve been able to help people find their power, and that’s an amazing gift to share. I think you should be proud of that.

Holly:

Thank you. Beyond accessibility, it is meaningful that the form of performance we’re engaging in Epicenter and Pi*llOry is not a solo endeavour: it is intentionally collaborative. I was gifted with early experiences of learning about performance art and myself through collaborative settings in workshops and community settings. Sometimes, I think that my performance-as-research projects are a selfish act–I crave that community, I need it, and I’m doing it for myself as well. This doesn’t just go one way. The artists in both projects have given me a space where I get to talk about my experiences and work through traumas, questions, and curiosities. I would never have been able to do that without each and everyone one of the people who have taken part in these projects. I would not be the person I am today without the containers they helped create.

Brody:

In my own life, I’ve often said that creating art has been one of the most healing things I’ve ever done. It far outpaces what formal therapy has ever done for me. It is transformational to create art from inside of yourself, collaborate with others, and have that be witnessed in the world.

You have a project alongside Fierté Montréal (Montréal Pride), the exhibition Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations at Eastern Bloc from August 1st–9th, 2025, with a performance event on the 7th. Can you tell me more about this project and how it extends or adapts your typical working method with Epicenter?

Holly:

Most of the artists in Epicenter are interdisciplinary artists, meaning they work in multiple mediums, including and other than performance art itself. The Epicenter performances were documented through photography, but we lost the documentation for the fifth iteration because the photographer’s roof caved in during a rainstorm, damaging his equipment. I saw it as a blessing in disguise, because it made us rethink documenting the project through photography alone. Obviously, we love having images of our work and need them for grants, funding agencies, and applications, but the performances’ focus on internal transformations raised a question of the appropriateness of a third party creating the documentation. We asked ourselves: How can we flip the traditional script of others documenting trans people, and create our own documentation of our own experiences? On a larger scale, there’s wonderful and challenging conversations to be had about trans people, documentation, and control. For example, the rigorous documentation required to access gender affirming health care.

I’m honoured that the participating artists have chosen to put faith in Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations and use it as an opportunity to continue our conversations about how best to create a record, document, or extension of the five iterations of the project. We all have different ideas and methods for engaging documentation, and these will make up the exhibition at Eastern Bloc in Montreal, including mediums like sound, video, installation, and ephemera. For example, Eva Gonzalez, the artist who used felting in their performance, has subscribed to major newspapers in the United States and has been clipping headlines and articles that talk about trans rights. Eva is creating a hand-drawn film from these materials which will be projected in the gallery, and the clippings will be present for gallery attendees and collaborators alike to create a papier-mâché sculpture that will hang in front of the projection to distort and reframe the headlines.

Another Epicenter artist in Poland, Kai Milačić, used a full-length mirror to paint and continually repaint their reflection during their performance, resulting in this layered depiction of themself and the internal listening they were engaged in. They have continued this process since the iteration in Poland, engaged in daily self-observation and self-portraiture, and these will be part of the exhibition.

Kai Milačić, Transition of the line, Poznan, Poland, Epicenter Six, 2023. Skye Wilk.

Damaris Baker, whose performance featured gluing hair on their body, is going to be doing another participatory action involving dirt and a recording of themself singing, alongside a space for viewers to write down what the sounds bring out of them. While listening, people will be able to interact with dirt and feel their own internal sensations, and maybe even transformations. Freddie Wulf from the Berlin iteration is sending their top surgery band aids to display.

Since August of last year, we’ve been discussing and asking each other: What means and modes of documentation are effective for performance art? How and when can we document performance? Do witnesses alter or influence the nature of documentation? How does documentation create opportunities to reflect, reconsider, or extend performance? Through this process, artists from different iterations of Epicenter have gotten to meet one another over regular online meetings, so it has extended and strengthened our community as well. Eventually, materials from the exhibition will become a publication with writing from each artist about their performances and documentation process, and in their own languages, with English translations. They can use drawings, sketches, or whatever means of communication they want to express how they thought about documentation. It will be another document and archive of trans narratives, experiences and creations, with the artists having ownership and authority to discuss their own experiences, methodologies, and ways of living and creating for other people to come across.

Ruya, Silent Revolution, Poznan, Poland, Epicenter Revolutions Six, 2023. Mattia Spich.

Brody:

Both the exhibition and publication sound fabulous. It’s exciting to hear that the documentation emerging from the durational performances has a kind of durational or time-based element itself, manifesting in acts of collecting, repetition, and revisiting.

You have, alongside all the artists that you’ve worked with, created a performance art community that centres queer and trans experiences. That’s really admirable. Do you have any advice, words of encouragement, or wisdom to share with someone who might want to create a queer performance art community where they live?

Holly:

The first thing I would say is: just do it. Find a group of people that are curious and get weird. Just start. Nobody needs to know how to do performance art because we already do. We’re performing every day. Be brave and silly and find a group of people ready to do the same. Most of these things happen in people’s homes. There are quite a few collectives in Toronto that have happenings in people’s houses, where they invite friends and share small pieces of performance and talk about them.

You can easily find performance scores online. There’s a great book by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who is the founder of La Pocha Nostra, a performance group based in Mexico, creating art and resources on non-hierarchical performance pedagogy. They have a book that I highly recommend, full of scores, exercises, and teachings: La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post Democratic Society (2020).

You can also reach out to artist-run centres in your area and ask them if they know anything happening about performance art. There are often little workshops that happen that might not reach people widely. Ask: Are there performance events happening soon? Do you have any contacts of people who organize performance events? I think the best way to do it is to create opportunities for yourself and others from the ground up. It’s my favourite thing to do.

You can find more of Holly Timpener’s work on their website and Instagram.

Burning in Loops: DIRD’s Animated Apocalypse and Alternative Futures

DIRD, *Mountain of Reincarnation* film still. Photo courtesy of the artists.

By Adi Berardini

In the world of DIRD, narrative glitches behave like corrupted files—flickering, freezing, and repeating themselves. Stories unfold, collapse, and reappear across shifting landscapes, building what they call a cyclical apocalypse: a world where endings are never final, and the possibility of an alternative future flickers in and out of view.

Formed by Rui Shi and Zijing Zhao, DIRD works at the intersection of stop-motion animation, sculpture, and moving image. Their practice is rooted in the logic of animation—an understanding that movement and transformation are not just techniques, but philosophical conditions. “All cinema is animation,”[1] Alan Cholodenko once remarked. DIRD extends this proposition into a world where myths, ruins, and spectral bodies refuse to remain still.

Hand-sculpted forms appear alongside digital models; web-based interactives are layered with hand-painted textures. A single puppet might be sculpted from paper, its fragile limbs flickering in stop-motion, only to be re-imagined as a digital avatar wandering a frozen, browser-based mountain. In this sense, animation is a mechanism for conjuring life and provides a way of activating matter, generating illusion, and testing non-linear time.

DIRD, *Mountain of Flames* film still. 2020-ongoing. Photo courtesy of the artists.

DIRD’s ongoing project Mountain of Flames (2020–ongoing) embodies this philosophy. It builds a burning world shaped by Eastern funerary culture and the legend of Princess Miaoshan, a figure who defies patriarchal authority, dies by fire, and reincarnates as the bodhisattva Guanyin. In DIRD’s retelling, Miaoshan’s body is constructed from fragile paper. She collapses and reassembles in endless loops, as if trapped inside the broken machinery of myth itself.

This myth is dismantled and recomposed, becoming a structure for queer worldbuilding and cyclical regeneration. The project has expanded across multiple works: Mountain of Reincarnation (2020), a browser-based 3D landscape in which viewers must wait through endless loading loops; and Miaoshan (2023), screened at Goldsmiths CCA, where gestures falter and images stutter, producing an unstable visual terrain. In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.

If the apocalypse in DIRD’s cosmology is ongoing, their new work asks: what keeps producing it? Increasingly, they turn to the worlds of videogames, not as fans of gaming culture, but as critical observers of its embedded structures. For DIRD, videogames often encode patriarchal and violent logic: war as the default narrative, technological advancement as a weaponized drive, progress defined through domination.

In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.

Their next project, provisionally titled Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, examines how digital spaces rehearse violence again and again, simulating crisis as both entertainment and control. Battles are repeated, maps are drawn, and borders between self and other are endlessly re-inscribed. In these systems, the apocalypse is a design principle.

DIRD does not seek to replicate gaming aesthetics in a literal sense. Instead, they extract the logics of loading screens, glitches, and respawns, and bend them into queer, feminist, and monstrous imaginaries. If games produce war, DIRD asks how art can produce peace, not through naïve utopia, but through speculative failure, haunted spaces, and monsters that refuse to play by the rules.

Central to this vision is the figure of the monster. In DIRD’s works, monsters are not villains but alternative hybrid bodies. They inhabit the cracks of collapsing worlds, carrying with them new ethics of survival. For the duo, monstrosity is a form of magic: a way of suspending the violence of dominant systems and opening portals into parallel dimensions.

In their upcoming installation, these monsters are imagined as guardians of a counter-world, holding open a protective “enclosure” where war and technological violence lose their grip. Within this fictional spell, destruction is not the end but a threshold. Fiction itself becomes a weapon, or perhaps more accurately, a healing device and an imaginative structure that interrupts violence by inventing other ways of being.

Rather than escapism, it’s a critical use of fantasy, what they call “ruinous worldbuilding.” By constructing spaces that flicker between collapse and possibility, DIRD positions fiction as a necessary tool for confronting the real, where crises of climate, patriarchy, and technology demand alternative visions to resist despair.

Artist photo: Rui Shi (right) and Zijing Zhao (left). Photo courtesy of the artists.

DIRD’s works insist that apocalypse is something we are already inside and not an event waiting in the future. From burned paper bodies to frozen browser mountains, their worlds mirror the sense of living amidst political, ecological, and technological systemic breakdowns. Yet their vision is not nihilistic. In the ruins, they conjure cycles of rebirth, queer spaces of reorientation, and monstrous figures that refuse violence.

In Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, this vision turns explicitly toward peace as an ongoing, fragile practice and a willingness to imagine otherwise. If patriarchal war games train us in repetition, DIRD proposes different loops: flickering, failing, regenerating. They create spaces where endings multiply, and where another kind of arrival might just begin.

To see more of their work, visit Instagram: @ruishi.ruins / @orchidmoths.

[1] Alan Cholodenko and Australian Film Commission, The Illusion of Life (University of Sydney, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1991).

Femme Demo: Studio Visit with Jenny Fine

Jenny Fine, *As in a Mirror, Dimly* at Ortega y Gasset Projects, 2025.

Interview by Julia Betts

Recently, for the first interview of Femme Demo, I spoke with artist Jenny Fine through a virtual studio visit. We discussed her recent solo exhibition As in a Mirror, Dimly at Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) in Brooklyn, New York and its place in the larger context of her work.

Jenny Fine is a visual artist based in Alabama. Grounded in photography, Fine’s artistic practice investigates her personal and cultural identity. She has shown her work nationally and internationally at venues such as Geh8 in Dresden, Germany (2012), the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio (2015), the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York (2015), the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University in Georgia (2022), and 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina (2023). She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2006 and completed her MFA at The Ohio State University in 2010.

Left: Jenny Fine, *Psychomanteum*, 2025, spun cotton, paint, steel, fabric, tarpaulin, light, fan, mirror. Bottom right: Jenny Fine, *Milagro, Shores of Sheol*, 2025, spun cotton, paint, gel medium, paper, foam, folding chair.

Julia Betts: Hi, thanks for speaking with me today! I’m curious to learn more about your show at Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG).

It seems like family is a really big influence in your practice. Can you talk about the role of family in your work? I was also wondering if your family members were included in the photos and sculptures in the show at OyG.

Jenny Fine: My family really started in the beginning as unknowing collaborators, but continued to work together over time. My grandmother Fine, who later becomes Flat Granny, a character in my ongoing body of work, was a school teacher. In undergrad, when I was studying photography at the University of Alabama, I would come home some weekends or on holidays and we would spend the whole day into the afternoon, early evening staging photographs. And she was all in. As a college professor, she was very passionate about it. She also understood the patience it took with learning. While I was trying to figure out the exposure triangle and compose the photograph, she was always telling me stories. The pace of my photography practice is set to the pace of her storytelling. In that way, they’re inextricably tied. She would tell me about stories from her childhood, her past, but also stories that she had heard from her family members that had been passed down to her.

That became a through line in my work, using the photograph and the collaboration between my family as an opportunity to see them in a new way. As we get older, we understand family dynamics more than when we were younger. Photographing them is a way of looking at them straight on, passing down stories.

Grandmother Fine and then my sister Beth, who also passed away, are both central. My dad and my mom as well. I have another sister. All the people in my family really are central figures in the ongoing narrative of my work. I see them as collaborators, with both of my grandmothers and my sister as posthumous collaborators in my work.

There’s a post-mortem photograph of my sister within the evil eye sculpture [at Ortega y Gasset Projects]. Even as a kid, I would be able to go straight up to the casket and look out and touch my relatives. But she was always in the back. She had this fear. I know that she doesn’t want people looking at her. She was cremated. There wasn’t an open casket. The image of her is hidden inside the eye that becomes this ocean. And there are these bobbers, which are these characters that come from the narrative of swimming witches. Anyway, the narrative is long and winding. I think it’ll be a narrative I continue to work with. So, as they go on, I’ve been using my art to bridge the divide between here and where they are.

Jenny Fine, *Evil Eye*, 2025, spun cotton, paper, paint, light.

JB: I noticed that with your series Flat Granny and Me and then the series at OyG, that it’s both about these female members of your family? Are you interested in female narratives specifically? Or is it anyone in your family?

JF: I’m specifically interested in female narratives. I am the primary caretaker of my 93-year-old granny. She was one of five girls. Then my grandmother had two girls, and then my mom had three girls, including me. And so, there’s a strong female lineage in my family, and therefore a lot of stories from the female perspective. There are stories from the male perspective that have been shared with me, and I’m interested in enacting those, but I think the primary role models in my life have been the women in my family. So, I’m definitely interested in their perspective and their narrative.

Jenny Fine, Flat Granny as a costume, no. 4, 2012, archival pigment print.

JB: It also seems like photography plays a prominent role in your practice. I was noticing that you’re kind of inserting liveness into these static images. Can you talk about your interest in spiritualism in relation to photography and how that came about for this exhibition at OyG?

JF: Yes. I think that there is a resurgence of spiritualism in the decline of religion across the United States. Churches are closing all over the place, and in its place, I think spiritualism is on the rise. I was always interested in photography as a form because it mirrors the world around us. And therefore, because it looks like the world around us, there’s this element of truth or fact. With spiritualist photography, they were debunked, and it was often considered fake. It was a hoax. But even after people realized, they would still attend these studio parlors where you could have these spirit photographs taken. I was interested in that idea because I grew up going to church with a strong Christian background.

Jenny Fine, *Ectoplasm*, 2025, archival pigment print.

But the death of my sister really rocked me in a way that other deaths have not. We were Irish twins. We were 18 months apart. We grew up together. She was my companion from birth on. Well, birth until her 42nd birthday. This idea of yearning for connection, always going back to the photograph because I’m interested in photography, photo history, and the magic associated with it. The photograph as stand in. The evolution of the sentiment around an image that is captured and reproduces and mirrors the world around us, that gives us evidence that people were here before. All that is really fascinating to me. And for that reason, I choose photography more than painting or something else. I’m starting to do sculpture because I want my hand and my time to be very evident. But that’s the incentive, for pushing the photograph beyond the 2D image into more sculptural or becoming more of an object that can be held and can become an amulet.

Jenny Fine, *Seance*, 2025, spun cotton, clothing, fabric, frame, jewelry, decorative light with flickering flame.

JB: I noticed that your work at OyG was more geared towards creating discrete sculptures than some of your past works. Do you think this is a new direction for your work?

JF: It is. I’m trying to really make a concerted effort towards making works that can be consumed, collected. I guess that is the better way to say it, to be collected. Creating immersive installations, which is what I’ve been doing for the past decade, takes a lot of time, effort, organizing people, and administrative tasks. I had the opportunity to have the show at OyG and because of constraints, with travel and budget and all the things, I decided to try to take the essence of some of these ideas, using the components of the immersive installation. I use materials that I have at hand that are everyday materials like glue, cotton, cloth, and plastic single-use bags. Any discarded object is repurposed as material and ends up becoming part of the work. I wanted to scale back to sort of grab at the essence through photo sculpture. I also [added] video and animation to some of the works themselves to bring in some of the components of time. It’s a new step for me and one that I want to continue to explore. It’s very satisfying to make the work and for it to be done and hang it on the wall. With the immersive installation, delivering the work and beginning to install and respond to the unique architecture… of course, I’m prepared for it, but it’s always a labor, and so I asked myself, what do I want? What kind of labor do I want to do? And at this point, I wanted to really just be in the studio in conversation with material rather than a lot of people. I needed to do something more solitary.

Jenny Fine working on *Psychomanteum*, Studio shot by Charity Rachelle.

JB: Definitely. I really loved your materials at OyG. I noticed the blue tarp, especially. I was wondering if you have an interest in materials that other people typically classify as “low material” and non-traditional art materials. You mentioned discarded objects.

JF: Right, right. Well, it’s a nod towards class. One of the reasons that my sister died is because Medicaid in the state of Alabama has not been expanded. I know now across the nation, it’s all on the chopping block. She could get emergency care, but she wasn’t able to get a primary care physician because no one would take Medicaid. It’s a loop all to say.

I’ve been asked before, why don’t you like chisel marble instead of using a tarp that you found in the garbage can or one that you could get at Home Depot or Lowe’s? And really, it’s about access, class, and what I have at hand. It’s about making do and living within the boundaries and using the material to speak from a specific place.

Thinking about a tarp, it’s often found, and it’s used for protection. If you have hay, you put tarps over it to keep it from getting wet. It’s used over cars or busted windows when hurricanes or tornadoes come through.

Also, I used all of the elements from the immersive installation to help continue to build out the sculptures, the photo sculptures that were in OyG. A lot of the wear and tear that is on the tarps is actually because of the performers using it over the last four years that it’s been toured. So really thinking about the evidence of time and the performance, like the residue of that or what remains of that or the product of it. In that way, the immersive installations are a generative thing.

JB: The other thing you mentioned about your work at OyG that was different was the sound and motion component. Have you explored this before and what interests you about it now? I was thinking it related to your performance work.

JF: With the photograph, it was always me capturing the picture as a performance was unfolding in the field on my dad’s farm or in an old house that we came upon. The photograph became a stage as this performance was unfolding. I was capturing single frames. Of course, I could take several in a row.

But I then started thinking about adding time back to the photograph. I started by making simple stop-motion films in graduate school. And then, I started moving around puppets or dolls. And then, after Flat Granny became a thing, wanting it to not be such a static flat image, but wanting her to be able to pose and make new movements, so that the performer could break the illusion. You could see that it’s a photograph that’s being worn by a performer, so that the collision of time is evident.

Jenny Fine, *Wheel of Life*, 2025, spun cotton, paint, gel medium, eyelashes, photograph, spinning motor.

The immersive installations really were just enacting a little section of a narrative. The audience would come into the immersive installation not really knowing what had come before or what came after. There were these redundant movements like waving back and forth or of someone riding a parade float. I also used sound throughout the installation at different locations, by Taylor Shaw, so that when you moved into the installation, the recorded sound would layer with the live sound of the performers, but everyone would have a unique experience based on where they were within the installation and what soundtrack was on.

Jenny Fine, *Synchronized Swimmers,* 2022/2025, archival pigment print, immersive installation performance still.

JB: You also mentioned that the pieces at OyG use repurposed materials from your previous installation Synchronized Swimmers, right? Can you talk about that installation?

JF: Prior to that, I created a parade float of my grandmother, and it was a memory that I had never seen but only walked around through her imagination. I imagined the things that she was telling me, and I recreated this photographic installation based on how I imagined it. It was really around the time when everybody’s asking, “Who gets to tell the story? Is it your story to tell?” So I started thinking about my personal experience and those stories surrounding that. My grandmother’s pool– I’m a triple water sign, if that makes any difference.

JB: [gasps] I’m a triple water sign too. [laughs]

JF: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. What are your– what is it?

JB: I’m a Pisces sun, Pisces moon, Cancer rising.

JF: Oh my God. We are exact. I am Cancer, Cancer, Pisces.

JB: Oh my God.

JF: You might be my yin.

JB: Wow. This is crazy.

JF: That is crazy. We have to talk about this more, but all to say, my birthday is June 24^th. My grandmother had an in-ground pool installed in her backyard. She was a teacher at the local community college, and she put in a pool when she retired. And while we were learning to swim, she was learning to swim. And just a lot of childhood memories surrounding her pool and storytelling. When the rain came, she’d get us all out and we’d have snacks under the umbrella, perfect to sit under in a lightning storm. But she would tell us stories. In particular, ones that stuck out in my mind were this idea of swimming witches, trial by water. But just really her telling those narratives, filling our brains with all this imagery. And then the rain would stop, and she’d throw a watermelon in the pool, and we’d all jump in after with all this in our minds after swimming all day long. I would even imagine swimming in my dreams. Her pool’s deep end would become like the ocean floor. I started thinking about women, water, and regional stories, as well as stories told through literature, drawing inspiration from Odysseus and the sirens.

I was interested in creating an immersive installation where viewers could walk inside and it was going to be a “dinner theater.” As I toured it and worked with different institutions and different budgets and constraints, food became the least important part of it. It wasn’t quite like the dinner theater, with appetizers and such that I had imagined, but the essence was all there. And I got a chance to show that a couple of times, I think four times. Two weeks before I went to show it a fourth time at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, my sister died unexpectedly. I was really shook and I focused that exhibition on this drowning witches scene. They’re these dancers in blue in the tarp bobbing up and down. And there’s this finger with a lifesaver tied around it. And there’s a light that then projects the shadow onto the back wall, and one of the performers flicks that finger. It sort of bobs this lifesaver shadow near the girls. I was thinking about Medicaid and our health insurance. As we moved into As in a Mirror, Dimly, about other kinds of insurance, things that we pray for and hope for, and things that we find hope in, or luck, protection, et cetera.

JB: I was also wondering about, in general, where you think this body of work is taking you and what your plans for your work in the future are.

JF: The work that I’ve just made, I think I have a few more images, a few more things in me to sort of wrap those up. But I would like to use As in a Mirror, Dimly as a sketch or also as props in sets for the camera in my studio. I don’t want to get too far away from photography, from photographing people, from compressing and expanding time within the frame of a photograph. I don’t know that all those parts have to be accessible to the public.

I’m going to hunker down in the studio and create a new body of work, and I have some ideas. I’m always trying to create this idea of a musical, and it falls way short of that, which is fine because I’m not trying to build this impossible thing. I’m really trying to get at the essence of it. The idea is that I will introduce Beth, go into the afterlife, and pull Beth into my work. I’m going to figure out how to do all that and what that looks like. But it will include a lot of symbols from my work that I’ve made in the past.

JB: That sounds exciting. So the last thing- what would you like to demo for us?

JB: Thank you so much for speaking with me today!

Check out more of Jenny’s work at her upcoming show There, There at Old Bailey Gallery in August 2025 and on her website and Instagram. Listen to her discuss her work on Alabama Public Television in her recent television feature.

Between the Senses and Horizons

*“Tracing Memories”,* Samina Hassan Laghari, 2023-24, Diptych video, 10 minutes. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

By Jabeen Qadri

Horizon is Home at Articulate Studios, Lahore, Pakistan, curated by Quddus Mirza, featuring artists Abdul Haadi, Samina Hassan Laghari, Salar Marri, Seema Nusrat, and Farooq Soomro. The exhibition ran from December 23, 2024, to January 5, 2025.

Dec 24. 5.45 pm. Shalimar Town, Lahore.

I’m still not accustomed to the sun setting this early. Despite being here for almost a month, my mind is operating on my hometown’s time, and I didn’t anticipate the darkness at this hour. Or it may be that my subconscious had a better experience planned for me to view the exhibition. I retrace the steps from the last time I visited this heritage house. It was almost a year ago, but I remember it quite vividly like it was yesterday. I remember having a sore throat in winter and wearing a pink sweater and an Afghan choker, neither of which I’m carrying today. I remember there were some lights leading up to the gallery space, and people buzzing about. It seemed a different place altogether today.

“Asalam o alaikum,” I hear a voice in the pitch-black darkness, as I’m turning off my phone’s torch, seeing the entrance lit and doors open. The guard must be wondering if he greeted a real person or a ghost. I think the same about the guard.

As I enter the exhibition, it is lit up and ready, but with no people, like Marie Celeste, found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, without a crew or passengers, but with all their belongings intact. The first two works are installed behind curtained rooms. I resisted going inside—the last thing I want is to step inside a dark room—but I find myself immediately drawn to the videos installed and forget about the dark or being alone in this aged building.

Seema Nusrat, 2024. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

The exhibition titled Horizon is Home, curated by Quddus Mirza, is an outcome of a three-week-long residency hosted by Articulate Studios in Chitral and Lahore. The artists include Abdul Haadi, Samina Hassan Laghari, Salar Marri, Seema Nusrat, and Farooq Soomro. Horizon as a concept has been celebrated by artists across history, compositionally, conceptually, and symbolically. Mark Rothko, for instance, used horizons notoriously in his colour field paintings. They say about Rothko’s work, “This is not the kind of painting you can talk about – you have to experience it.” [1] And though formally, the horizon functions as a point of separation, a sort of groundedness, that enables the eye to see what is depicted. Yet, the eye of the soul sees beyond the separations. “You feel as though you have been captured by infinite horizons and absorbed into imaginary seas with hallucinatory hues.” In our daily occupied and chaotic lives, the eye of the soul remains quite suppressed, hidden behind the intellect. The simple act of viewing art is enough to open this suppressed sense. I feel a similar response to Horizon is Home, where my inhibitions are disrupted and I feel lost to the world of the imaginary, contemplating memory, identity, boundaries, and separations.

Inside the dark rooms, video works by Abdul Haadi and Samina Hassan Laghari greet me. I find the dialogue the works create with the building’s structure fascinating. The video projections feel like echoes of the past, the walls adorned with artists’ connection to their homelands, with environmental or geographical contexts. The dark room holds an intimacy; the exhibition soon turns into a confrontation with myself. The silence of the video works is deathly, making the projections more powerful. I feel teleported to my childhood. I notice there are fireplaces in the dark rooms; it’s an aged house after all. I wonder what stories the fireplace tells. At this point of metaphysical experience, I applaud my choice not to visit the opening of the exhibition but rather, to visit it the following day, where I could dive into the experience of the works together with the surrounding space, without human and social interruption. My social anxiety turned out to be my prize after all.

Farooq Soomro, 2024, archival ink print on photopaper. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

As I walk further, I find light and still images. I breathe a sigh of immense relief to see familiar monuments and figures, but the confrontation with myself continues, and I can’t escape it. I find destruction, congested houses, bougainvillea, and traffic, all reminiscent of Karachi. These are photographs by Farooq Soomro. No matter where I am, it’s a delight to find a trace of my home. Even though the artist created depictions of other cities and places, he uses the Lahore smog as a metaphor for blurry reality in contrast with a beautiful, blurry landscape of a valley from Chitral. Similarly, Salar Marri’s series of multimedia works Ambiguous Nature of Being is consumed with blurriness in imagery as well as the use of material, which takes me to another sphere of existential inquiry. I regret that to truly experience the ambiguity, I wish I hadn’t read the title of the series. What I see is the blurred boundary between the city I’m in and the city where I come from. It takes me back to my thought a day earlier: would I ever be able to see Lahore (or any other city) for what it is, or would I always compare it with home, Karachi?

Shortly after, I see models of homes arranged like apartments, made with green covers used during construction. The sculptural work by Seema Nusrat highlights the environmental damage caused as homes and trees are being replaced by buildings. I enjoy the placement of the work the most.

*“Erosion”, S*amina Hassan Laghari, 2024, inkjet print on tracing paper. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

Just when I think of leaving, my terrors reignite as I witness Samina Hassan’s print on tracing paper. Not that it was horrible; no, it was quite the opposite. As an artist who loves using tracing paper, I was immediately hypnotised and slightly afraid. The print combines various geographical landscapes, from Sindh and Chitral, depicting the environmental damage. I could see surreal objects and figures coming together in my mind’s eye. Combined with the scale of the work, the aesthetics of the aged building, and my childhood memories already invoked earlier, it reminded me of Count Dracula’s house at the top of the mountain. The isolation felt real and near. At this point, I think of the guard who must be wondering where I went, if I am real. The last thing I want is to be locked inside. I take a final look at Samina Hassan’s print, which is challenging to articulate, so I write a few lines of poetry and leave.

Bushes take me somewhere

They itch, they scratch the edges

Blood rushes, drip by drip

A voice calls me towards it

I’m scared to go, to look in the eyes

This could be home

References

[1] Art Basel. “Mark Rothko in a New Light.” Art Basel. Accessed December 25, 2024. https://www.artbasel.com/news/restrospective-mark-rothko-fondation-louis-vuitton-paris-reveals-lesser-known-aspects-american-painter-work.

Introducing The Old Tai and Beijing Shichahai

*Red Bean* by Tianjiao Wang. Film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Tina Wang and Tianjiao Wang

The Old Tai and Beijing Shichahai (老太和北京什刹海) is an artist duo formed by Tina Wang and Tianjiao Wang. They are interested in important yet often overlooked qualities in the art world, such as the courage to be generous to others and not feel taken advantage of, the question of how to sustain one’s practice within a nourishing environment, and how to make art in a healthy way. They are willing to invest deeply in these concerns. Their work seeks to resist oppression in contemporary life and to foster better expression, storytelling, and sharing. “The Old Tai” comes from Tina’s long-standing artist name, 太太, modified with an adjective for a desire for the wisdom that comes from becoming older, while Beijing Shichahai refers to Tianjiao’s desire to root her identity in her hometown of Beijing.

Tianjiao Wang is interested in acknowledging the presence of things. Through photographing and filming, she anticipates drawing others closer, while simultaneously keeping them perpetually within the realm of the other—without crossing boundaries, without encroachment, without fusion.

TAITAI +/-/x/÷Tina makes perverse dioramas with organic materials in all states of their solidity to emphasize the malleability, humor, and fragility of the human condition. Her ecosystem of movement research for performance that leads to object making (film, photo, and ceramics), which is fed back into the installations, guides her practice.

Tina Wang: Why have you recently become interested in performance?

Tianjiao Wang: It might be because the medium of performance shares many connections and similarities with the filmmaking I’m doing—they both invite the audience, as a collective, to share a period of time together, one that is durational and demands attention. So, the reason I’m inviting you to work with me on this performance is to use the act of doing to gain a more panoramic understanding of a certain unfolding. But I especially want to collaborate with you because I’m reminded of scenes with two female leads in film and television—most directly, Bergman’s Persona (1966)—and the energy that arises between two women. I believe performance, as a medium more immediate than film, offers us a lot of space to explore. I’m curious about something you mentioned before—you described my film as having a certain atmospheric quality in relation to space. You said that’s something you’ve been pursuing in your own practice recently; you also mentioned that it feels like our practices are somehow crossing paths. Can you elaborate on that? What about my work that made you feel this resonance?

Tina: Mhmm! Yes, your videos bring forth this installation quality that I am pursuing in my work with foam and paraffin wax. Maybe this is the perfect time for this collaboration of exchanges in media. Even though perhaps you would not call your work installation, the work that you screened at Roman Susan where viewers sit with the imagery of a landscape that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us feels like one. It is familiar because I have seen trees and been on hikes. But it is unfamiliar because I have not been explicitly to that exact scene you have. The slow speed at which the video moves gives me agency as a viewer, and space and time to take it in and feel.

Tianjiao: In the film Fall 塌, I believe I continued an interest of mine—the idea that the act of viewing can be one of absorption. This state of absorption can act like a catalyst: you might find yourself in resonance with the protagonist, or with the ladybug in their hand, a falling leaf, or the sunset over the Indiana Dunes…The interplay between text and image, and the subtle discrepancy between information and affect, have always been my sources of inspiration. But in Fall, what interests me is the intertextuality between human presence and landscape, or perhaps the refusal to let the human figure be the sole protagonist. The landscape, too, can take a leading role, occupying space with authority, allowing a reciprocal energy to move through the film. From another perspective, I feel that the presence of the characters I’m interested in also becomes fluid in this film. I’m still exploring this aspect, something like the energy connected to a film, and the kind of capacity or state a person brings home with them after watching it.

*Fall 塌* by Tianjiao Wang. Film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tina: I am with you, making work that can create a world in which people can see and feel themselves in, but is it unfamiliar enough to push their total understanding? Against the strict functions and associations that people, places, and things have in our lives? But I also wonder about my own biases. Perhaps I am still stuck in a specific binary framework of value placement- familiar/unfamiliar, slow/fast, boring/interesting. I make decisions to try to remain in an “in-between” state, but still feel caught in it. What is moderation? There’s a certain pressure of not wanting to be too boring or too interesting. If it is too boring or interesting, it does not allow that kind of absorption you are talking about. In that way, I sense a tremendous, perhaps misguided, sense of responsibility.

Having worked as a performer for others for more than a decade now, I have been in many types of processes. Even if the process of a performance is somatic-based and slower, inevitably, there is a quickening and hardening against the gaze of the viewer. Maybe there is a fear of being boring. Like you said, I am sharing time with my viewers, and I want to be generous. I hope for absorption also, not just what I am doing, but a weaving together of one’s attention and associations of what is happening. Perhaps it’s a shared curiosity? Compared to me, I sense you have less pressure in showing your video works. I feel like I can take the time I need and project myself into them.

Photo by McCall McClellan for TAITAI +/-/x/÷Tina’s work, *Where are the concubines*?

Even though I made the “transition” from dancer to performer then visual artist, using the body is still such an important start to my process. I touch my face on a wooden floor and feel support. I sink into a soft pillow and feel my neck ache. And I see myself wanting to recreate a variety of associations of “comforts” for an audience member in an art setting. Do you feel that way when making? Or do you have certain goals/ideal states for your viewers?

Tianjiao: In past screening experiences, I’ve sometimes felt an unprecedented level of nervousness or pressure when showing my film to just one individual. That feeling probably stems from being too self-aware—either because I know exactly what I’m doing in a particular film, or, on the contrary, because I’m acutely aware of my own uncertainty about something. I get anxious about how they might respond. But in a conventional cinema setting, surrounded by complete darkness, it’s different. Maybe the darkness helps—I’m half joking, but maybe it really does. I don’t know who’s sitting in the audience, but I’m also sitting among them. I become part of the audience. I feel comfortable. In those moments, I’m no longer the maker. I especially felt that way with red bean. I was able to simply enjoy watching it.

When I first read Nathaniel Dorsky’s description of how watching a certain film can make one feel healthy, it immediately resonated with me, because that’s exactly how I’ve felt after seeing the work of many contemporary filmmakers I adore. It’s not necessarily a sense of healthy because the film is hopeful, uplifting, or even gentle, but because the combination of medium, technique, and message comes together in a way that makes one feel whole or well.

I was quite surprised that you used the word “comforts”, because I might have thought of safety instead. I can see how your work constantly engages with familiar things in unfamiliar ways, but for me, unfamiliarity doesn’t necessarily bring comfort. I’m not sure if what you’re referring to is more accurately described as emotional comfort. Or perhaps it’s the second half of the sentence—“in an art setting”—that you were emphasizing?

Tina: Healthy! I had never thought of that, but perhaps that is what I am thinking of too. Contemporary society asks us to fragment and compartmentalize so much of ourselves, our senses, desires, goals, and the ability to be generous. Seeing a work that can let a person feel absorption (as you mentioned before) is perhaps what I mean by comfort. I don’t expect my audience members to feel comfortable seeing my work. Most of the time, as you have alluded to, there is a feeling of unease and lack of safety.

In my performances, I see myself creating these microcosms of the insane things we do to try to make our lives feel meaningful in contemporary society. I put excess and mess on display because to me, that is the calibration, an in-between state in trying to work through an idea to a final product. We are often asked to either justify the end because of the means or the means for the ends. Perhaps like all the attempts of other artists to queer categories and binaries, I want to queer our definitions of finish, polish, success, finality, and achievement. Things are messy and ambiguous but always visceral in my work because that is something we don’t see much or think of as positive or even productive in the world.

That being said, I also do believe in the need to not just do what gratifies one’s senses. I think that is what is pushing me to make work beyond performance. I have such pleasure in non-verbally showing the gamut of emotions I feel when I encounter something hard (tile) versus something soft (melted wax) as I world-build these performative dioramas. But how do I keep inviting different types of audiences in? How do I also restrain myself in the work to create more contemplative experiences?

The body is not always moving but is always being put on display, asking to be judged in some way. But can its complicated and contradictory “moves” be translatable into an art “object” and retain its mobility? I think and wonder about stillness a lot. How do you make decisions about stillness and motion as you go into the editing suite? Do you find yourself guided by intuition for the most part? Are there moments that you didn’t but felt happy about the outcome?

Photo by Michelle Reid for TAITAI +/-/x/÷Tina’s work *Where are the concubines?*

Tianjiao: Sometimes the process feels like hunting—there’s an element of luck involved. But when the camera captures a certain moment, I immediately know I’ll use that shot. That said, there are also times when I get strong footage, but end up letting it go because it doesn’t fit into the flow of the film.

Fall was the first film where I entered the editing suites without having gathered all the footage I had originally imagined. That decision was also intuitive—I just knew that what I had shot so far wasn’t enough to fully form a film. I started editing partly because there was an opportunity for the Roman Susan screening test, and I wanted to try out the experience of both working on and showing a work-in-progress. But that process gave me new insight into the material. It was also in the editing suite that I realized the landscape had gradually started to stand out more than the main character.

I appreciate what you said about “not just doing what gratifies one’s senses.” When I first encountered those durational structuralist films, they felt like a direct counter to conventional viewing rhythms—many of them, to me, were about endurance and reshaping the viewer’s patience. Lately, I’ve been exploring whether a durational film could slow down someone’s metabolism, rather than being long for the sake of being long.

This ties into my thoughts on stillness and motion—not just in terms of visuals, but also conceptually and technically. It’s about how these elements work together to create a particular viewing experience, something that ultimately serves the audience.

Tina: I am now thinking about a recent rejection email from a reputable foundation that compiled the jury’s notes with the help of AI, and a comment that stood out was this: “The intention is clear, but the community impact could be described more directly.” Here we are talking about internal intentions and desires, but of course, there is so much hope for external understanding. I know all the cliches about not depending on one comment or feedback from one organization, but outside of graduate school or group critique settings, how does one know or gain data points to measure that translation from intention to reaction? And how does one trust the feedback of the viewer? I am grateful to you for trusting me and look forward to making this performance with you.

Performance proposal: Our desire to collaborate comes from Tianjiao’s curiosity: can an artist who has always performed independently find a kind of equilibrium when working with someone else, remaining true to themselves while allowing another person to coexist through forms of collaboration, support, or simply presence? Our tentative title centers around the idea of undomestication. Tina has developed a body of work called ‘How to domesticate Tina’ that takes the form of a video and live performances.

Tianjiao will use choreographed poses by Tina to make her body resemble unstable, unreliable pieces of furniture for Tina to interact with. These interactions can be physical or verbal. But because each of my poses can only be held for a limited time before collapsing, Tina will have to find the next “piece of furniture” to engage with.

Since Tina has historically performed non-verbally, her act of domestication will be to verbalize poems of fitting in as she tries to receive support from Tianjiao’s untrained body. The collaboration pushes up against the line between suffocation and support in questioning how to still find belonging as both parties fail at their tasks together.

I’ll Pick the Cyborg: Connective Thread at Ivory Gate Gallery

*Connective Thread* installation shot. (L to R) Work by: Lauren Seider, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Sam Jaffe. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

By Samuel Schwindt

Florals dance with armor; aggressive suturing marries fossilized detritus; foreboding becomes forewarning.

The idealized fractured is the idealized subverted — according to Ivory Gate Gallery’s group exhibition Connective Thread (curated by Michelle Alexander). Slipping down concrete steps in the affluent Chicago Gold Coast neighborhood, there’s a lurking, foreboding glamor in the works of Michelle Grabner, Sam Jaffe, Lauren Seiden, Michelle Alexander, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Carmen Neely.

The exhibition statement enshrines the showing as “both the intimate and universal aspects of womanhood.” The nestled below street-level gallery harbors quasi-textiles, papers, and other ephemeral-made-permanent gestures. The works propose a retribution: a re-framing without the frame. The frame, being the body, is absent; and the absences in the show can, and will, inform a liberation.

On the left, a scrunched construction is vaguely body-adjacent, an unstable figure. The steel-y outside hides an interior of blackened, shiny, and cratered skin. Lauren Seiden’s Ultimate Shield (no. 6) is an in-flux armor. The skin is the frame, is the architecture, is the body – a futuristic blending of form, envisioning where the melting of material personas and roles resolutely solidifies into self-defense, allegorically connecting to extraneous forces contorting bodies in space.

Sam Jaffe. *I’ll Pick You*, 2022. Mixed media on wood. 7 x 22 x 5.5 in. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

In the middle, Sam Jaffe’s I’ll Pick You is an algae outgrowth, a fossilized specimen of flowers in delicate pastels. It evokes a species of sneaky flora; perhaps one that has evasive or self-protective maneuvers. In a manner similar to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I don’t want to state this is beautiful. When writing investigations (autobiographical, scientific, poetic) about the color blue, Nelson writes beautifying color choices are, in fact, “murderous to beauty.” Her investigation carries on with the societal cliché’s of women feeling “blue” and the pathologizing that follows. The colors Jaffe’s weaponizes remind me of this line: “If a color could deliver hope, does it follow it could also bring despair?” ^[1]

Michelle Alexander. *The Mother, The Sister, The Pressure.* *Connective Thread* Installation Shot. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

In the back, Michelle Alexander’s runaway bride is caught by a typical fashion display rack. It’s in a confused state (positively) of becoming—ready to be pulled for a fitting, yet also an archaic object. The staples-as-stitching propose an aggressive, immediate fix. Maybe the gown ripped, and before walking down the aisle, an assistant stapled skin. There’s a profound absence in the piece: an absence of an experience that happened long ago or maybe won’t happen at all. On a site visit, the artist told me the dress reflects pressures—familial, social—to get married, and the fears she may never embark on that traditional female rite of passage.

Michelle Grabner. *Untitled*, 2024–2025. Glazed porcelain and oil paint. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

In the back, Michelle Grabner has a knack for coaxing the ordinary into the glinting sacrosanct. The sculptures on the floor at the back are a surprise house-party guest; one who maybe wasn’t invited but lovingly welcomed upon arrival. A doorstop is a disruption next to the immortalized ceramic cleaning supplies; a measure to keep a conversation open, like when one is departing a house and has their foot slightly in the door (but their body is angled out). There’s a romance towards the labor history; a beauty seeking demystification in scrubbing the final soap suds from the previously murky sink.

To the side, Carmen Neely’s Remember is a ripped diary entry, petrified in its moment of creation but excavated for the present. The lithograph is brainstorming sketches tracing existential dread. The text ranges from half-cursive scriptures such as “Your work will survive this” and “You will survive this.” The final statement on the right leaflet-made-lithograph is a ligature. It echoes reminisces in the show on the cruelty of stagnation: “The heaviest borders are clenched tightly…. Anticipating release by your own muscles.”

Carmen Neely. *Remember*, 2023. Lithograph on paper. 12.5 x 14.75 in (framed). Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

Threaded together (sorry, I know) are manifestations of utopia: I can’t help but think of automaton constructs, post-human musings, or retrospections on a past that unfurls into a questionable future. The group exhibition becomes a reckoning in this way, resonating with Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). The artworks operate as fictions blended with social reality, where science fiction tangles with societal oppression. Haraway wrote that the women’s movements of the late 20th century were key in unearthing a collective consciousness of resistance within tight seams, and the cyborg metaphor liberates through “imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.”^[2] The real and the socially constructed become an “optical illusion,” and the cyborg embodies an “intimacy with a power” not born from the history of sexuality (cue Foucault, of course). In this way, the exhibition draws on material manipulations rooted in traditional craft—sewing, quasi-ceramics, printmaking—to conjure an uncanny, future female body basking in dangerous glamor.

Connective Thread lurches towards luxury, rooted in a morose meditation. While there are harbingers of despair contained in the gallery (a runaway bride, for example), they showcase a solace in standing resolutely. It’s almost ritual, almost kink: a slow summoning that borders on spellcasting. It purports to be a fix of the ways women are viewed in an all-consuming patriarchy. But it becomes a stitched revenge salute in the end; an acknowledgement and a wink, like when you rough scrub a coarse edge to get a glinting smoothness. Smoothing the rough edge doesn’t provide it autonomy; perhaps accentuating the seam does.

Check out the closing reception of Connective Thread on Friday, June 6th, 5:00 – 8:00 PM at Ivory Gate Gallery (Chicago, IL). You can also view the exhibition by appointment on June 7th and 8th.

^[1] Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009. P. 12.

^[2] Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. P. 6.