Weaving a Daisy Chain Fields Reaction: In Conversation with kelsey merreck wagner

kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Emma Wannie.

Interview by Adi Berardini

kelsey merreck wagner is a textile artist, environmental activist, and visual anthropologist based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She focuses on textiles that reuse and reinvent abandoned materials such as plastic bags, used clothing, and even remains of celebrations, like tinsel. With an eco-feminist focus, wagner is interested in exploring life cycles and human-environment relationships, especially our connections to animals, the impacts of climate change, and the influx of trash in local ecosystems. She received her PhD from Michigan State University, where she studied environmental activism and community-engaged art in Thailand.

Recently, wagner took part in Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Festival in Great Park, Irvine, California, which raised 20 million dollars for 10 non-profits that support women and girls, such as Planned Parenthood, Baby2Baby, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, and the Centre for Reproductive Rights. The festival was founded with the principle that “joy, community, and creativity can create meaningful change.” Daisy Chain Fields featured a stacked lineup of musical artists including Olivia Rodrigo herself, Chappell Roan, Doechii, Garbage, Bikini Kill, and more. Notably, the festival also displayed installations by an incredible caliber of visual artists, such as the Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Hayes, and Yoko Ono. The historic event truly demonstrated that together women could make a meaningful change, and as Rodrigo describes, “Daisies are wild and beautiful. As a chain, they are strong and unbreakable.”

In the following discussion, wagner discusses her art practice and inspirations, and the once-in-a-lifetime experience of taking part in Olivia Rodrigo’s all-women music festival, largely inspired by Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair, creating ripples of change through the power of music, art, and togetherness in an increasingly divided society.


kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Emma Wannie.

Can you explain more about your artistic process of weaving abandoned mediums such as plastic bags and recycled materials to address the complex web of ecology that we live in?

I have been working in weaving and textiles since about 2017, and my work has always been about environmental issues. During my undergrad, I was trained in printmaking and ceramics and used my work to talk about endangered species and animals, specifically human-elephant relationships, and had some success with it. I also wanted to try new things, and my undergrad didn’t have a Fibres program, so it took me a while to get into it. When I lived in Boone, North Carolina, I went to a community fair festival, and there was the Blue Ridge Fiber Guild there that had a tent, and some of the women were out there with a spinning wheel and a small loom and told me they had free classes at the community center. I was super excited, got hooked on weaving right away, and definitely loved being around all these women who were mostly 60, 70, 80 years old and had been working in fibre for a long time. It was such a cool environment to be welcomed into, and have community, and sisterhood, and grandmas that wanted to teach me things.

I got hooked on weaving, but at first I didn’t really see the environmental connection to my work. I’ve always really wanted to focus on destruction, especially by humans. Then, during COVID, I started running out of yarn, and all the good local yarn supply stores were closed. Then I got the idea to start using plarn, which is just a combo of the words plastic and yarn, from people who crochet mats and things for unhoused folks. I loved that history, and how I could incorporate that into weaving and transform my work to talk about pollution and the effects it has on environments and humans, branching off and different from my other work. I started collecting plastic bags and slowly incorporating them into my weavings. I just take a plastic bag and scissors and cut it into a really long strip, essentially, and that becomes my yarn. I started doing weavings that were half and half and slowly started doing some medium-sized ones and [showing those in] exhibits.

There’s a gallery there called Warin Lab Contemporary, and they only do exhibits about environmental issues. They offered me a solo, and I really wanted to make something different and not just have the wall pieces that I’d been doing, and to get a little bit more experimental. I decided I would make massive weavings that were going to be suspended from the ceiling in the colors of red, orange, and yellow. They were hung in a loop to look like heat maps and connected to climate change. However, because they were so big, I had to get way more than plastic bags because I don’t dye any of my materials. It’s just whatever colors and things that they come in. Because those weavings for that exhibit were so large-scale, I started to also collect clothing and wires and old fabric or housewares, tinsel and Christmas garland and decorations. That really expanded my reach in terms of materials I was sourcing. I lead lots of different environmental cleanups and do a lot of community engagement artwork with that.

I also have partnerships with some different organizations. I work with Goodwill Industries and get their reject materials, and I work with a tinsel company in LA called Corrie in Color that gives me huge, massive mounds of tinsel. All of that has been incorporated in my work over the years, and just thinking about kind of confronting people with how much waste we have. It’s like this record of capitalism and this endless consumerism. That decision to use plastic and recycled materials was me referencing the idea that weaving’s been around for like 500 to 100,000 years. It’s a very place-based activity. It’s very much a women’s activity of raising animals for wool or growing cotton. It’s very place-based and social or relationship-based.

As a nod to that, I was [thinking], “Okay, so as a Western woman in America, I don’t have family members with a textile history. What does my practice say about my connection to place?” I was thinking a lot about the major impact Americans have with everything we buy and our landscapes being covered in trash. That’s how it got started, and it was cool to focus on our impact on the environment in a way that makes people really think about it. And especially the fact that I source my materials from community members and friends and family and local businesses. It’s always an exchange, you know, of conversation being like, “Okay, well, why do you have all these plastic bags?” It becomes this way where we can talk about how big a problem it is.

It makes me excited to hear about your process. I think it’s interesting: the connection to the COVID-19 pandemic and having a lack of your typical materials, but then getting creative in that sense too. When you have limitations, that can affect creativity as well. I am working on a painting that I stretched canvas over a wooden drawer from Goodwill to repurpose it as a panel and save money. But it also has more interesting material value since it has a past life.

Yeah, exactly. It totally forced me to think of something new and being able to reuse it. And what you’re saying reminds me also of when I’m collecting all these materials from people and organizations. I always think about the memories that are embedded in them. People giving me their maternity jeans when they were pregnant, or all these different kinds of little things that tell stories. And the tinsel company that I work with, I love thinking about how they do these gorgeous art installation tinsel backdrops, and how these were there for birthdays and anniversary parties. All these things where I’m like, “Okay, I’m now collecting all of the good that was once in these and giving it a new life.” And of course, getting stuff from Goodwill, having free or cheap art supplies is a big deal as an artist.


kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Emily Milton.

You recently took part in Olivia Rodrigo’s all-women charity festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which is so amazing. I was wondering, how did you get involved with the festival? Did she call you directly?

No, she was working with a production company called C3 Presents. They were producing the event, and they reached out to me via email and basically said, “There’s going to be a women’s empowerment festival in California that we’re interested in having your work for, and we can’t tell you more about it until you sign an NDA.” And so I was kind of like, “Okay, what is happening?” And then they sent the NDA, and it said that it was an event by Olivia Rodrigo. I worked really closely with C3 Presents to go through the design proposal. But Olivia and her team had found my work on Instagram and were interested in doing something. It was fun to go back and forth about the space and what they were interested in and make that happen. Getting to hear that Olivia Rodrigo had seen my work was crazy. I did that and sort of settled on the design and the exact location and then moved forward from there. I got to meet her after the concert, which was super cool, and hear from her about how excited she was and that she’s pulled something off so amazing at 23 years old.

That’s amazing. I’m a fan of Olivia Rodrigo’s music too.

It’s really good. It’s kind of pop-punk. And then, seeing all the different musicians she had for the festival, it was cool to see that she draws from all these different inspirations.

They also didn’t announce who the other artists were going to be until a week before we were all going to be there to install, so I had no idea. I knew that it was going to be all women artists. But I had no idea who they were. And then they announced it, and it was Jenny Holzer, and the Guerrilla Girls, Yoko Ono, and then Rachel Hayes, who’s a really cool fibre artist I’ve followed for a while. That was such a crazy thing to me, thinking about how when I was 20 years old and in art history classes, like, learning about those artists, I would’ve never thought that one day I would be exhibiting on the same stage with them.

You’re in good company!

I cried in my studio, being like, “How is this happening that these people that I’ve admired for so long, that I’ve now gotten to a point where I get to be around their work?”

I was wondering if you could discuss more about your featured immersive installation, arachne, as part of the Dasiy Chain Fields Festival, featuring eight colorful weavings hung within the trees. How was the installation set up for the event?

At my studio, I have eight different looms, and I worked to get all of those weavings done using recycled materials. They were all about 25 feet long. I did them in colours of the rainbow, which is something I also try to do with my projects as a little nod to things that are now being banned in America. Then I chose the name arachne, which is from Greek mythology about a weaver who challenged Athena. Athena heard of her weaving and her bragging about how much better she was at weaving than the gods. Then they had a weaving contest, and Arachne’s weaving was much better than Athena’s and displayed the gods doing embarrassing things in compromising positions. And Athena lost and then turned her into a spider so that she couldn’t do anything anymore. I really liked that narrative in terms of thinking about what happens when women call people out or call corporations or the government out. That you can be right and you can do better, and you’re still likely going to be silenced and not listened to.

Also, thinking about my connection to the environment and the fact that they were going to be suspended from trees made me think about women and how we’re always bringing people together, and also so much of our relationships being grounded in the environment and how nature shapes us. That was sort of the backstory or inspiration, especially once I found out that we were going to hang them from the trees. I got there and had two awesome helpers from C3 Presents who helped me get them in the trees. We had super tall ladders and laid out all the weavings on the ground, and then just decided which trees we wanted to have them hanging from, what colours we wanted to have interacting, and how they would be placed. It went really smoothly.

kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026 (from installation day). Photo credit: Emily Milton.

That’s such a fascinating story about the Greek mythology weaving competition. That’s one thing that really stood out about Daisy Chain Fields is the idea of women coming together to empower each other, because that’s not always the case. Sometimes women have that competition over community mentality. That seems like one of the magical things about the festival—We can achieve more by standing together.

Do you have a memorable experience from the event that you’d like to discuss?

Part of the most memorable thing is that attendees were probably 90% women or feminine-presenting, and then the rest were gays, theys, and girl dads who were there. It felt so safe and chill and just peaceful. Everyone was just nice and complimenting each other. You weren’t worried about men harassing you or being unsafe.

One of the memorable things I would say is seeing the Guerrilla Girls installation. They had this little pop-up where it had lots of their reproductions of the posters, some of their most famous things, like the “Do women have to be naked to get into the MET Museum?” They’re tracking how many museums show women or give retrospectives to women, and then at the same time, these things that they were critiquing were now in a space where all of the artists were women, all of the musicians were women, all of the food and drink vendors were women-owned businesses, all of the crafts and things you could buy were all women-owned. It was crazy to think of the things that they were critiquing, and of course still are in other settings. But ironic that it was in a space where it was totally flipped.

Another thing that I thought was interesting is they had such a stacked lineup of amazing musicians, and there were 45,000 attendees. I have to assume a fair amount of those people were there because they wanted to see Chappell Roan or Olivia Rodrigo, and maybe some wouldn’t consider themselves feminists or are the kind of people that would say, “Oh, I’m not political,” or, “I don’t get involved.” But I felt like the energy and having the non-profits there and just all the girl power vibes, surely some of those people that only came for the music left a little bit radicalized. We saw what happens when we have solidarity and alliances, and that solidarity doesn’t just mean that you care about the people that look like you, or you care about people that are going through the same problems as you. It created a broadening of our understanding of what feminism needs to be, having more intersectionality. I felt like that was something that I really hope had a big effect on people that came and saw all the cool things.

There were 10 different charities that the money went to, and it was all different organizations that are supporting women and girls and all kinds of things, from healthcare to helping moms to justice with labour. They had all the charities do the introduction for the different artists. They got to come up on stage, talk about what their organization does, and then introduce the artist that came on.

There were two stages, and the venue was massive. I was in the middle of them at this point. I wasn’t super close to the stage; they were getting ready for the next musician. And one of my favorites was when Planned Parenthood came on and did their introduction, and you could hear cheers everywhere. I was so far away from that stage, and people were just screaming. Here’s the organization that so many of us in America have relied on for all kinds of healthcare, not just abortion care, but being there for women when they need affordable ways to be healthy and safe. And knowing that that’s so under threat in America and then seeing the joy or support of hearing everyone cheer for that as if they were cheering for the musician was super cool.

It really felt like the past, present, and future all at once. And there’s a saying I really like: “Revolutions take lifetimes.” And I think that’s so true that we’re always working to make things better, especially for the next generations. But it was so cool to have all of these different generations that have worked so hard to advocate for us. Olivia, who’s 23 years old, put this festival together and raised $10 million, and she brought this together with her amazing team. Then Melinda French Gates came out on the stage and announced that she was doing another $10 million and doubling it.

Then, Olivia had Sarah McLachlan come on stage, who was the founder of Lilith Fair, which this festival was modeled after, the first female music fair. And so it was like such a callback to other generations. And then Sarah McLachlan and her did a couple of songs together. The second one they did was “Angel,” and Sarah McLachlan, and she said that the song was in honour of Dolly Parton, who was a huge philanthropist and advocated for communities and for women. It was all these steps. And then Stevie Nicks came on and was like, “Hey, we’re passing the torch.” And it was so cool to see everyone honouring each other.

This is so great. I feel like I’m living secondhand.

Yay! It was so cool. Then the Guerrilla Girls-I was so inspired by them as a young art student and how much they’ve advocated for the inclusion of women and later non-binary people, like all these voices that haven’t historically been in museums. It was just so cool to be like, “We are moving it forward. There are always people in past generations, women and allies, that have made it better for us, and now it’s our turn to pass that on.” That was such a cool, empowering kind of thing to see. That there is change, and even though everything seems so shitty right now, you’ve got to keep doing the work and making it better.

Another thing was that it reminded me of the power that art has to transform culture. Whether it’s music, performance, literature, or visual art, what we do and what we make impacts the way that non-artistic humans experience the world. Art can both show us what things are and talk about difficult issues, but it can also be used to talk about a future where things are different. That transformative thing where you have all of these creative women coming to the festival to put on this magical experience was like, “Okay, so art is doing something. It is what we need to change the needle.” It was super memorable to have gotten to play a small role in that.

kelsey merreck wagner. arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Alive Coverage.

Did you have a favorite musical artist from the lineup that stood out to you?

I really like Rachel Chinouriri, and she is from the UK. I was introduced to her music by finding out about this festival. Getting to see her live after learning her songs recently was killer. She just had an amazing stage presence and so much joy.

She did an unreleased song and stuff from her new album that’s coming out, and so it just felt like this intimate sharing. That one was my favorite.

Seeing The Breeders was also really cool. Knowing again, all these generations that have been feminist and brought that to music coming together was special. And then definitely Olivia’s performance, and having Sarah McLachlan, and then Alanis Morissette came on as a surprise, and then closed out with Stevie Nicks doing “Landslide.” It was just awesome. I cried so many times.

Then Olivia’s band is all women and non-binary musicians, and they were all wearing T-shirts of women-led bands or their favourite women performers. And I thought that was just such a cool nod. That again, it’s these histories of women that have made it possible for us, and now we’re on the stage, or we’re exhibiting. It was cool to think about that phrase, “You have to see it to be it.” And being like, “Okay, it’s there,” was super cool, and getting introduced to new music that I didn’t know before, and younger musicians.

Your work addresses themes of community engagement and environmental art and activism. Can you explain a bit more about your research and how craft and textiles can also connect to social change?

My PhD research at Michigan State is focused on Thailand with environmental artist-activists, and that led to some different opportunities. During my PhD, and also a bit during my Master’s, I was thinking about how communities can be part of artwork, in terms of making it and thinking about it, and that it doesn’t have to be this separate thing between the artist and the art consumer. Over time, a lot of my work has switched into more of a public art practice, where I do show in galleries and museums, but I really prioritize public art that is free for anyone to enjoy and not just something that you have to be in a museum for. It can just be something that you’re walking by on the way to work, and that it’s accessible and can bring joy to anyone. Over time, prioritizing that, I’ve started to do projects where I have communities help make the work that’s going to be exhibited. In the past, I was doing complementary or supplementary activities with weaving, but the artwork would be my own. And now I’ve been starting a series of public art projects in DC and North Carolina.

 For my dissertation research, part of it was with environmental art and activists, so artivism. In Thailand, you are not allowed to critique the government or the monarchy or even corporations that they like. As a result, art has become a powerful way to talk about issues but also to have some plausible deniability or messages that are encoded. That’s really inspiring to me, thinking about, again, how art can transform things. In another kind of smaller side project within my dissertation for one of my chapters, I was working with a women’s weaving cooperative along the Mekong River in Thailand.  We were focusing on the ways that they tell stories through weaving, and how it talks about or connects to their relationship with the environment in ways that weaving is always denigrated as women’s work, or it’s a craft or a hobby or something, without understanding what an economic impact it is. Additionally, what it means to have these stories or histories embedded within the fabric that women make, particularly amongst Indigenous textiles and symbols that indicate a particular location or context.

Thinking about textiles as something very political and then also the ways that textiles have been talked about as being craft, or not seen as the same as other mediums, I think is really complicated and troubling. Anni Albers is one of my favorite weavers, who was at the Bauhaus and then taught at Black Mountain College. She was just this absolutely amazing powerhouse weaver who broke the boundaries between art and craft. And yet still, when I go to exhibits at sometimes major museums or even books that have come out recently, she’s always described as Josef Albers’ wife. I’m so sick of women being described based on their proximity to men rather than recognized for the things that they excel at.

Another Guerrilla Girls connection is how, as a group, they taught me to go into museums and count how many white men are in an exhibit, and how many “others” are in it. I feel like textiles, being a fibre artist, has also taught me that when I go into exhibits, I’m like, “Okay, there are seventeen paintings in here. There are eight sculptures, and there’s one weaving or one piece of fibre art.”

Especially being mostly women, we’ve had to fight so hard. First, being women artists, but then second, because our medium or our discipline is not seen the same as other mediums. I think it’s interesting watching the ways that textiles of any kind – quilting, embroidery, weaving – are slowly being accepted more as their own art form. I think that’s powerful because women have been basically holding up humanity for forever through their textile practices. The roofs on houses were first made from fibre, and clothing and functional objects for our homes.

I like getting to be a part of that and showing the power textiles have, especially related to the history of it. A lot of fibre and textile artists that I admire focus on community, memory, and engagement. It’s been fun to be a part of that.

You can view more of kelsey merreck wagner’s work on her website and Instagram, @trash_weaver.

Who Taught You to Love? In Discussion with Pamila Matharu

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

Interview by Paniz Vedavarz and Adi Berardini

Pamila Matharu is a multidisciplinary artist of Panjabi descent (maternal roots from pre-partition Lahore of former British India (now Pakistan), then Jalandhar (Panjab, India), and paternal roots from Bhano Langha, a village of Kapurthala district, Panjab, India, born in Birmingham, England, and arrived in Canada in 1976. They are based in Tkarónto/Toronto – Treaty 13 territory. Approaching contemporary art from the position of critical pedagogy and using an intersectional feminist lens through counter-archiving, their work culminates in a broad range of forms, including installation art, collage, social practice, and experimental media art.

Matharu speaks more about their art practice and their exhibition, Where Were You in ’92? at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, curated by Emelie Chhangur, Nasrin Himada, and Charlotte Gagnier, and their multi-media installation as part of the 2024 Toronto Biennial, tere naal _ with you, that pays tribute to the enduring influence of the artist Winsom Winsom. Pamila was introduced to Winsom through the Fresh Arts program, a Black artist-led initiative that opened doors for numerous artists. The installation was deliberately designed as a space for rest as defiance, nurturing, and replenishment. Reflecting on standing up against current and past injustices, Matharu uses the space to instill a sense of hope, asking participants to reflect on the question, “Who taught you to love?”

Paniz Vedavarz: Your zines and installations interweave your personal experiences with wider community stories. How do you navigate blending your own voice with the voices of others, particularly when dealing with sensitive or painful histories?

I’m coming at it from lived experience. My storytelling is being accessed through my own lived experience, my memories, visceral memories. What I’m trying to do is use history as a medium, and I started to realize that history wasn’t changing much around looking at police brutality on Black and Brown lives. What does it mean to witness it at 19 or 20 years old? What does it mean to witness it in my 40s and my 50s now?  In some ways, I’m using the circle as a framework, but has the needle really stretched that far? In some cases, yes, I would say. But still, there’s a way to go.

Adi Berardini: For sure. Especially seeing everything right now in the news and politics, it feels like we’re going so backward.

Pamila Matharu: This is what I mean.  It’s when people ask, “Why are you delving into the past?” Well, you can’t figure out the future without looking at the past.

AB: You address mentorship through your practice, such as your exhibition ‘Where Were You in ’92?’ at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, which looked at the Fresh Arts multi-disciplinary arts program in the 90s that created space for Black and Indigenous youth, and later racialized youth. You particularly reference your relationship with artist Winsom Winsom. Can you explain more about this pivotal mentorship and how you’ve used it as inspiration in your practice and as a mode to research and display the under-recorded impact of the program that impacted generation(s) of artists?

PM: Fresh Arts is a period that comes up in the Black Arts Movement. And when we talk about movement, when it comes to art history, it’s always Western methodologies and Western art history, yet the Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists are nowhere to be found. And we are always the sidebar or the thin chapter at the end, or perhaps the last couple of lectures in a Western art history survey course.

The project I was invited to at Agnes Etherington Art Centre was to “roll out the red carpet,” or metaphorically, finally give my flowers to Winsom. What I mean by that is to explain my relationship to her, and how I have spoken of Winsom informally in spaces and with curators and with artists, with institutional folks for the last 25 years; my relationship passed 30 years in 2024, when I met her in the summer of 1994.

In 2022, the project at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Where Were You in ’92?, was mostly research-based. I often use my platforms strategically to invite other underrepresented artists who I reckon could use exposure from the platform I’m initially asked to take up space on. In this case, I was asked by Emelie Chhangur, the [former] Executive Director & Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, to examine Winsom’s relationship to the city of Kingston, Ontario.  At the time, before or while the request was happening, Winsom’s actual archive was being shipped from Belize to the AGO Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives.  I had to access her archives at the AGO Library and Archives, which I had previously had a relationship with through an earlier project I did in 2019 at A Space Gallery, where I found some discarded material from their library and archives. I built an entire exhibition, and that’s where this moniker of counter-archiving came from, because I did not undertake an information sciences degree or anything of the like.

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

I’ve always had a strong interest in research from primary sources like books and literature. I’m not a practicing writer— I write for pleasure and my own studio practice, well, grant applications really! I definitely dabble in creative writing, but I don’t make it one of the things I share openly too much, and Emelie was aware of that. In terms of my lived experience and narrating this story and legacy, in a former project we did earlier than that, back in 2012 at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, in an intersectional feminist exhibit curated by Pamela Edmonds and Carla Garnet. Emelie had already, in some ways, planted the seeds of inviting me into Agnes and to do this project. Chhangur really is the constant gardener!

But in some ways, I was circumventing and ‘migrating the margin’, which was also a show that we did at the Art Gallery of York University [Now The Goldfarb Gallery of York University]. But I’m using the terminology of migrating the margins, where I was looking at Winsom’s archive at the AGO Library and Archives, which houses six boxes of fonds.[1] I think it might be growing for Winsom’s practice, in terms of her materiality, her research material that she’s archived. And I was asked to focus solely on Kingston, Ontario.

Winsom spent close to 30 years in Kingston, Ontario, and I believe that she helped establish Black Kingston, and what I mean by that is community-engaged, artistic programming, as well as organizational activities. Kingston has five jails, and there are a number of hospitals. It’s also formerly Upper Canada, and that was the “center” prior to Ottawa becoming our federal capital. In terms of the nation-state history, there are a lot of layers, and I was challenged to think through and grow a methodology from the archives and unofficial records.

I say it’s a methodology because my methodology is collage. I use it in the most abstract sense as well as the most very minute kind of paper collage: paper and cut and paste. But then I also collage in space, through sound, video. I created a handmade collage mural on the walls of Agnes, where I surveyed Winsom’s 30 years and all the material that was within that roughly 30-year span in Kingston.  I selected over 100 fonds initially. And then the designer I worked with, Cecilia Berkovic, and I whittled it down to about 50, about half of what I gathered. It was things that were of interest not just to me, but I was thinking through the prospective audience who would come through, perhaps former student-artists, like the child artists that were in some of the photographs I selected. People did arrive and say, “Oh, this person taught me in this program here in Kingston.” Or a person would come in and say, “I did a cooking thing with Winsom, or I did this, or that with Winsom,” so all these wonderful stories started to unfurl in Kingston.

[Since] I was also looking at the story of Fresh Arts, what I decided to do was predate Fresh Arts and look at the origins of the Black Action Defense Committee, which was very instrumental during that time, and it predates Black Lives Matter Toronto.  And the history of how one arrives here, with whatever historical incidents that happen in your DNA when you arrive on Turtle Island. Then there’s a whole other battery of ways in which you are an uninvited guest received on Turtle Island. Whether that is the government-funded institutions like the police or formal K-12 schools or the publicly funded medical system, we have seen how these institutions have repeatedly failed non-white bodies of cultures, as well as white bodies, right? “Bodies of culture” is a term that I have learned from the social worker and somatic practitioner Resmaa Menakem, who wrote My Grandmother’s Hands; it’s not a term I came up with. So, white bodies of culture versus racialized bodies of culture, Indigenous bodies of culture, and Black bodies of culture.

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation detail. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

I was thinking through this visibility lens in terms of Winsom not only coming from Kingston, Jamaica, to Kingston, Ontario, but also establishing and bringing her young family there with her partner at the time. And then how they utilized numerous forms of education, not just in the public education system, but also as community-engaged public educators. It was just wonderful to see how she used her gifts as a visual artist, as a gifted culinary artist, and as a food justice practitioner to really make relational gathering spaces where people would come together and share, whether it was her storytelling or listening to invitational guest artists’ stories. The images were not of that sharing, but there was ephemeral documentation that these things did happen in Kingston. Then the other wall was about the Black Action Defense Committee up to and towards the Yonge Street Uprising.

[Regarding] Fresh Arts, the Yonge Street Uprising, which occurred in the summer of 1992, May 1992.[2] It was an incident in which a plainclothes police officer shot at a young Black man who was assumed to be affiliated with drugs and drug trading. Assumed is the keyword here. This narrative doesn’t change, right? It happened in the week that the verdict came out in LA about the Rodney King trials. The L.A. uprising happened in the same week, so Toronto and L.A. were both burning, literally and figuratively. I wouldn’t say fires were happening in Toronto, but they were in L.A., and there was definitely social unrest in both cities. In Toronto, there was a loss of businesses, and the very institution of policing is about protecting property, right? So, there’s a whole argument there to be analyzed around, well, what’s important?  Black lives or property?

I happened to be at the action. It was a peaceful demonstration for the day, until the Yonge Street uprising started later in the evening.  But I was not at the uprising. I was at the protest. I used the protest as a key event, and then I looked at the before and after, on one wall, the Yonge Street uprising. The Black Action Defense Committee organized the protest for the death of Raymond Constantine Lawrence, and then a look at today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

History becomes an active agent in that telling. That could have taken place in the form of a zine, but to me, I felt like I was using the walls as my substrate and then doing this gigantic mural-like zine. Those two narratives, I cannot separate my story about Winsom Winsom without talking about being at this protest [about] police brutality on Black life. It was my first public protest; about to graduate from AY Jackson Secondary School that spring, and I was just about to turn 19 that Labour Day weekend. And two years later, before I turned 21, youth of racialized communities were invited to enter Fresh Arts, and then I joined.

AB: Thank you for sharing that generous history and trajectory.

PM: I would like to stress that there’s never been an exhibit about Fresh Arts, and even around the Black Arts Movement in Canada. There hasn’t been a significant effort to bring this history together in something that can be catalogued. But I don’t think I’m the only one here sharing these narratives. As I mentioned, I’m using lived experience to tell these stories—They’re not fiction in any way.

Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid. 

PV: Your installations, specifically tere naal _ with you, seem to invite viewers into shared or communal spaces, such as the baithak (lounge) you incorporated into the exhibition. Could you talk about how you approach audience engagement when designing these immersive environments, and what role community-building plays in your overall practice?

PM: I think as a diasporic artist growing up in a South Asian household, or particularly in a Panjabi Sikh household, intergenerational sittings and gatherings are very indicative of our cultures. A lot of Pan-Asian cultures focus on tea gatherings, rituals, and ceremonies, and whatnot.

We don’t really have a tea ceremony per se, but we definitely have loads of tea time that happens, and you can have cups and cups of cha (tea) all day in Panjab, all over India, as well as in the diaspora. This is a very common thing to do, much like café culture. I reckon that café culture started in Europe, and it arrived in North America with the European settler culture. I was using the baithak space as a social sculpture, something that is more informal than western chairs and sofas. The sitting aspect is on the floor, with pillows and carpets to gather folks on and to have some much-needed respite and rest alone or in community.

What I have understood growing up watching my parents and all their peer groups is that BIPOC individuals don’t have the same playing field if we really examine labour markets and their operating systems. Who gets to rest, and who gets to just keep working, or has to? It’s not who gets to, as that implies a choice, but who has to keep working nonstop?

And often we hear this because the term self-care did not come from my culture, particularly. We have words for that, but no word says, “self-care.” That terminology came from movement elder Audre Lorde, African American thinker, writer, academic, and poet.  I was raised in that time period for Fresh Arts. I am reflecting on the second-wave Black feminist cultural producers who raised me as an artist. There’s no other way for me to address my communal gatherings of joy, grief, and solace. They’re not necessarily in a tavern or a bar, as a lot of folks in the community are sober.  It’ll be around non-alcoholic beverages, things that are specifically accustomed to our culture.

I didn’t necessarily serve during the installation; it was more of an action for holding space.  And when we talk about holding space, it’s creating that gathering space.  I’m implying, come and rest, or chill with your kids, or if you want to read a book, write, or draw, please come and do that. I was thinking through the space of the biennial: who gets to [rest]? It could be an active young family, or it could be elders.

I put two modern Adirondack chairs in there for folks who might have accessibility issues. I’m always thinking about who has access to these spaces physically, mentally, and intellectually as well. Access is not just about physicality. It’s also about all these kinds of capacities around human activity through one’s mind, body, and spirit.

The video was the one thing that I brought from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. It’s an 11-minute video that basically draws on my history on Turtle Island. Fred Moten, African American poet, thinker, writer, and academic, has a teaching strategy with his students where he asks his students when they arrive at their first meeting, “How did you get here?”  So, I use the framework of asking myself, “How did I get here?” When I think back to my past selves, how did I get here from May of 1976 and, prior to my arrival, my overall community from the early 1900s?

I delved into not just my lived experience in that 11-minute video, but I tracked the history and inquired about the history of when my people arrived and what happened after that. I go back to looking at the early 1900s, and a lot of people don’t know that over 2 million Indians were in World Wars I and II. In some ways, I’m using it as a pedagogical tool, but I don’t want to hammer it over the head. If you want to look at it through a contemporary art lens, I kind of throw that out the window. I’m going to play with all these strategies— arts pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and contemporary art design.

I am a former co-founder of the Come Up to My Room exhibit in Toronto, which lasted about 17 or 18 years, so site specificity and immersive installations were very significant in informing this work. I would say that I’m trying to disrupt the gallery space using that installation strategy, perhaps with how one would consider “community engaged.”

Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid. 

PV: I enjoyed that point about the privilege of who gets the right to rest.

PM: Exactly. Yeah, who gets that? It might be a [day off] for us today, but we’re working, right?  It’s a Sunday. A Sunday implies a lot of different things, but we’re working right now. We’re both labouring, right? Who gets to have the privilege of a Saturday and Sunday off? I’m taking my first rest from doing two careers. I’ve been a practicing artist for 31 years, and I have been a high school teacher for 21 years. It’s the first time I’m taking a break to go to grad school. I’ve been doing both full-time. In fact, I was worried about all this time/space, but my graduate seminars and TA and sessional work filled it right back up!

We’re all students of life until our very last breath.

AB: It’s quite amazing that you’re also a high school teacher. Can you expand on the role and the relationship of being an educator and how that plays into your practice a bit further?

PM: I was worried in the beginning about how full-time teaching would impact my art career. But then I realized they were interchangeable once I entered the high school classroom. It was almost like I was the visiting artist every day, but teenagers don’t see you as that. They have an idea that this is a classic high school experience. When you ask folks, “Did you love school?” You’re going to get a mixed bag of answers. But if you ask folks, “Did you love learning?”  Nobody’s going to say, “No.” Learning is a continuum. We’re all students of life until our very last breath. 

Schooling, though, is a whole different playing field because it’s about conformity; it’s about the nation-state, and how we’re taught. You’re going to go from that starting point to find your calling, your passions, and your purpose. If you look at the inception of schooling in North America, it was really from the Industrial Revolution forward. It was about getting folks in line for the masses to help generate and continue to build society. And that is going to happen with the masses, not necessarily the elite few that basically rule us. 

Once students and learners understand there’s a difference between schooling and learning, the synapses start going off. It’s like, “Yeah, I suck at this, but yeah, you’re right. I’m creative.” We have the natural ability to be creative. I think there’s a difference between looking at how education and my art practice are in some ways interchangeable and intertwinable. I look at my practice as a tapestry, rather than separating it into silos.

PV: As you develop Toronto Biennial of Art’s Zine Three, which focuses on futurities, what do you envision for the next generation of counter-archivists, activists, and artists committed to addressing underrepresentation in the arts?

PM: We’re centering Black feminist cultural producers of today in that third zine through the lens of futurities. It will be a gathering of the activities archived by the Toronto Biennial of Art. And Zine Three will focus on voices who were present during TBA24 and the resulting documentation of what happened. There was this wonderful project the storytellers made in my installation, and it was because Siki Soberetonari, one of the storytellers, said that she wanted to collect people’s responses to my question, “Who taught you to love?” What I suggested recently was that we gather all the responses and edit them because it’s about young people, zero to 100, who added their responses to the question I put up on the wall, “Who taught you to love?”  Love, meaning the idea of love and teaching. We’re talking about arts pedagogy and myself as a teaching artist; I use my art life as a form of cultural resistance.

 “Who taught you to love?” is not necessarily in the Ontario curriculum. I’m going outside of that, but it’s in my curriculum because I’m also reflecting on my relationship with Winsom Winsom. She taught me that teaching is love, which is a form of care. I’m also tuning into what I was doing and thinking with her at the time, and what she saw in me. Had she not seen me, I don’t think I’d be here today. She witnessed that I had something to offer the world and just encouraged me in a variety of ways over one summer, really.

I’m asking the public, “Who taught you to love?” and then that was recorded and taken up. The idea is that I want to build something where people can feel inspired by social change and how the arts are a fantastic tool for that, especially in a world that is so fraught right now. These are the conversations I want to hold space for. And again, thinking through that space, it was a container for all the programming that happened. I make these spaces so I can hold space for socially-engaged activations. The idea then becomes a little bit unsettling for the idea of a museum visit, a gallery visit, or a biennial visit.

Who has three hours right now? We are in an attention-deficit economy! No one has the time, or space, or bandwidth. So, when you intentionally create a space for care, when you intentionally create a zine for reflection, what can that then go on to produce for that individual or perhaps a group tomorrow or throughout the path they’re on? I’m just thinking through and around Futurities and the conversation around hope. The last conversation we had through my public programming was called Some Kind of Hope. So, it’s about hope. It will be about some kind of hope.

Check out this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art, Things Fall Apart, curated by Allison Glenn, from September 26 to December 20th, 2026.

[1] A fonds is a natural accumulation of records a person or organization makes or receives through their daily activities.

[2] For more context on the Yonge Street Uprising: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/activists-reflect-on-30-year-anniversary-yonge-street-uprising-1.6439452

In Discussion with Robin Henry: On Honey Dip and Creating Space


Portrait of Robin Henry by Natali Bravo. Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Étienne Lavallée

In the neighbourhood of the Old East Village, on the main Dundas Street drag, is an unassuming row of storefronts. During the day, Dough EV is a quirky doughnut shop, with rotating seasonal flavours, staffed by friendly queer employees. It’s a great use for what was formerly The Root Cellar. To the left of Dough EV’s entrance is a little green door encased in brickwork. At night, this little door opens to a dark stairwell, and if you mount that staircase, it’ll take you upstairs to Honey Dip. Honey Dip is no dive bar, but a spot for local artists, musicians, creatives, and weirdos to meet, mingle, and perhaps even collaborate. There’s something different happening at the Dip every night. It might be a DJ Night, a grindcore band, a crafting night, live noise rock, a record flip. The staff tries to keep it booked every night that the space is open, Wednesday through Sunday. Come often enough, you’ll get to know the regulars. 

On the dance floor, where our bodies intermingle, the distance that developed between us all during the pandemic narrows to a sliver. Strange bodies, unusual bodies, tattooed, pierced, patched and resewn, remade in their own queer image, mosh, dance, writhe and breathe together. The world becomes a little less lonely. Throbbing and laughing, dancing and touching, we’re unified. We become one again. This is our home, our world together.

Honey Dip owes a lot of its success to London’s queer community, especially queer femmes who attend Honey Dip’s many Sapphic nights. It is a queer-owned and queer-staffed establishment, and while it’s difficult for a bar to be a safe space, it is a compassionate and caring space. I had the privilege of sitting down with Honey Dip’s main founder, Robin Henry. Robin has been an active member of London’s art community through their work as The Real Antler Press, their multiple city murals, and past art exhibitions at TAP Centre and Jonathan Bancroft-Snell Gallery. We sat down together at Dough EV and chatted about it.

Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.

Can you run me through a history of how you acquired the space?

It used to be an organic restaurant, and the upstairs was a room for rent for bridal showers and office parties. The bar that was up there, the structure was already there, and there wasn’t really a stage. You could fit maybe one acoustic musician. Dough EV took over the restaurant, the upstairs sat empty. Some of my friends and I started booking shows in Dough EV in response to the general lack of musical spaces in the city.

This was after Call the Office had shut down, right?

Yeah, we had lost the Embassy, we had lost The Salt Lounge, we had lost many of the house venues — there just weren’t a lot of places. London[‘s music scene] was just revolving around the bowling alley at that time. We started booking shows and concerts, open mics, in the doughnut shop at the time. At the time I was booking with anyone that would let me use their space –at Brown & Dickson’s, Back to the Fuchsia, in the Squeaky Wheel Bike Co-op, and those are now going strong as Gears [Concert Series] — to convince anybody I could to post a weird little artsy event. We started doing it at Dough EV regularly around the end of February 2025. The two owners of Dough EV, Aaron and Tara, approached me and said the shows had been going really great, we’re doing them all the time, and we’d like to do something more serious with that. They asked me, would you be into going in on a venue with us? We received the lease in June, so we had until June to make it a viable space. So we flipped the space and renovated it. There were three months of renovation — the community rallied to renovate it with me. We didn’t hire reno help, it was just all DIY. We flipped the stage. Girls Rock Camp donated a stage they used for an exhibition they were involved in at Museum London; the premise of the exhibition imagined if the music scene was matriarchal instead of patriarchal. They built a music venue inside of Museum London for this exhibition, and then the stage sat in a storage locker for a few years. They contacted us when we opened and asked if we wanted it. We disassembled it and re-assembled it upstairs.

Within three months we had our opening, and I had an exhibition at the same time, which was crazy. That was at Jonathan’s [Bancroft-Snell Gallery], and I would be here from waking up until 11 PM building Honey Dip, and then I would have to get home and work on paintings for the exhibition until morning. The craziest work schedule I ever had, but very fulfilling. My entire life was consumed, dawn to dusk, by making an art space and making art. I had my exhibition, and within a week of the exhibition opening was our launch of Honey Dip. Also, simultaneously was the pinnacle of MAGICAL London. That was the crescendo of MAGICAL London. MAGICAL was a collective of show promoters and queer culture creators in the city. It evolved from its original conceptualization and morphed, founded in part by Regional HIV/AIDS Connection [funded by the London Community Foundation]. It was effectively a supergroup of queer organizers. It felt like, what if all these DIY organizers who were pouring money out of pocket to make these events happen, to make music performances, open mics, dance nights — what if we all had money to work with to host these events? The initial goal was to host 12 events, but when we got some funding, it turned into 3-4 events a month for a year, and then it crescendoed with a week-long marathon of events. It ended up being roughly 30 events and a book launch. It was a bunch of people who were used to doing it with no money, finding ourselves with money, so we were able to stretch it much farther than we expected.

What happened to MAGICAL London then?

It was incredibly demanding; none of us were getting paid to do it. It was such a consuming and ambitious project. It just ran its course. It was proof that with support these things could happen. Anybody in the arts knows that grant money doesn’t flow like water. Everyone involved in that work is still doing it in some capacity.  RHAC is still doing incredible work – Honey Dip came out of it, queer cultural forces came out of it, but we just don’t function as a collective anymore.

Everyone’s still part of the community, still organizing and gathering people.

Yeah, we just don’t have a shared budget we’re pulling from. In a way, that makes some of it easier: the fewer people you have to consult, the faster your work can go.

Willow Switch at Honey Dip. Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.


How would you describe the unique vibe and character of Honey Dip to someone who has never climbed the stairs to visit?

The vibe is – it’s if you let a bunch of people who organize house and DIY shows take over a cocktail bar. It’s like a package of peanuts that says “may contain nuts” – we are ground up, a DIY gathering space. In spite of having a home base, we’re still running it like it’s DIY because those anarchist values are interwoven with punk, underground, queer, and drag culture.

When Honey Dip first opened, it came out of a clear need for affordable art and music spaces in OEV. Looking back at the early days, what were the biggest hurdles in turning that concept into a fully functional local bar?

It’s my hope that this is still the early days. We’re a year in. I want this to be an institution in this city. Part of my desire in founding this place is creating a space for the outcasts, the queers, the musicians, the artists. I think one of the biggest challenges is that the culture of that type of nightlife is not baked into the fabric of London the way it may be in other major art cities. [We’re creating the kind of space where] you don’t need to know what’s going on, you just show up and see what’s cool. We’re teaching a new generation of London punks and queers what it is to have a gathering space and nightlife because we’ve all become accustomed to staying home and engaging with the world through screens and social media. We need to relearn how to engage with our people, in person.

With each other, to talk to each other outside of a screen.

The truth is capitalism benefits from us not gathering.

The alienation makes more money, right?

Yeah, and I view it as a very imperfect but very political thing, to create a gathering space for people who don’t have access to that regularly.  There’s plenty of bars locally that have not made it their grind to host local music events. Another challenge is that young people don’t engage with alcohol in the same way that we [millennials] do, and that’s our main revenue source, so that becomes a tricky thing. That’s why we offer alternatives and mocktails.

When I was growing up, drinking was a huge part of the punk subculture, and the way young people interact with alcohol is being approached with more moderation now, which changes how they interact with the space, right?

I think it always will be to some extent. But it’s different. I think they have a healthier relationship with alcohol. Our generation spent so much time sneaking around and hiding that we had weed because it was illegal, and now these kids can go to a dispensary, spend $5, and get an edible that will keep them high for the night. I think the biggest challenge is that alternative people, queers and punks, became accustomed to staying home. There’s nothing that’s for us, [that] lets [us] just hang out and do something on our terms.


You hosted an incredible number of events in your first year, well over 200, is that correct?  Looking back, what has been the most defining or surprising moment in the bar’s history so far?

It’ll be about 227 events by the anniversary. It’s hard to place. When you do this many events, it’s no longer any specific moment. One concert can feel monumental. When you place it in a sea of events, it becomes a drop. It’s more about the entire body of work.

Does it run together for you sometimes?

Yeah, they bleed together. For me the most life breathed into this neighbourhood, and to this scene, was our Halloween run where we had four concerts back-to-back, four events back-to-back, that ranged from a folk horror night to a surf rock night, to a DJ night, to Slash Need. To me, each one of those four events was so holistically different from the previous night. I was like, holy shit, London has as much of an eclectic range of creative engagement in this conservative city, in this beat-down little neighbourhood, as there is in any other art city in Canada. I really believe it. It has everything you need, but you do need to know where to look.

Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.

London is what you make of it, and it requires effort to find the good in it. But there’s a lot of it, is the thing. I think you and I are very much of the same mind that London has loads of potential, and it has so much good hidden within it. You’ve got to find it.
Yeah, these things don’t happen overnight. I think this vague idea of community is impossible to pin down, but you know it when you see it. There’s more to it than just talking about it.

Between live music and queer events to 16mm film screenings and creative workshops, Honey Dip is incredibly multi-faceted. What is the long-term vision for the types of programming you want to bring into the space?
Honey Dip feels like a blank slate; it takes a tremendous amount of effort to make this happen. It’s a lot of hard work on myself, the owners, the staff’s part. It is a lot of people coming to us with crazy, weird ideas. The vision is that we have more people coming to us with crazy weird ideas than we can handle, and it has to start existing in other places in the city in a major way as well.

I want our cup to be so full it floods the city around us, with queer culture and love, with dirty punks, and anarchism, and lowdown commies everywhere.


It has to overflow.
Yeah, I want our cup to be so full it floods the city around us, with queer culture and love, with dirty punks, and anarchism, and lowdown commies everywhere.


You’re seeking a very Ace of Cups situation.

It has to be! What’s the alternative? We wait for other people to do it? We wait for corporations to realize there’s potential for profit, so they target us, like they do with Pride, and then they withdraw when it stops being profitable? It has to come from the ground up. Seeds break through the concrete; no amount of concrete is going to stop that. I don’t care how cringe it is to be holistically sincere and optimistic. Being relentlessly optimistic and passionate has to be part of it, because if we want to believe in a better future, we have to believe in a better right now.

We have to put in the work on it.

It’s easier to believe in a better right now than ever, when you open up a space like this, and you see this many people gathering. It’s easy to believe in a better right now when the community has shown up as they have.

The timing on this has been kind of amazing. You managed to fill a cultural void at a post-quarantine period when we didn’t have a lot going on. Call the Office had closed, and you managed to fill something that was quite vacant. I think anyone here who’s part of the music, performance, and art scenes were really craving this.

The community was ready for it. See a need, fill a need – that very DIY punk ethos. When you can’t find a venue, you get a generator and have a show under a bridge. You can’t find a gallery that will exhibit your work, so you talk a coffee shop into hosting your exhibition opening. That fundamental leftist principle that you have to build the world around you.

Nobody’s going to save us but ourselves, right?
Right, no one’s going to do it for you. We’ve watched so many new bands form, new forms of cultural promotion like Sapphire 519, like Stompbox. These are all new in our community. We can’t skip over these other spaces that are also filling the need.

Sapphic Invasion at Honey Dip, organized by Sapphire 519. Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.

Do you think that the close-knit nature of our London community helped Honey Dip succeed?

Everyone in Southern Ontario uses Toronto as a measuring stick to determine whether their culture is successful, relevant, up-to-date, but if we opened Honey Dip in Toronto, it’s a drop in the bucket. If we opened it in Toronto, it might not be meaningful or a force that can affect a whole city. In London, due to scale alone, a 65-person capacity room can have a massive impact on the music scene. It can be powerful enough that many of the queers and punks in my age group had to move away from London to seek cultural fulfillment. [They moved] to seek out queer community, artists with vision in alignment with their own, and now people can access that here. I would rather do this in London, Ontario than any of the major cities. I’d rather do this here than Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal – because it is deeply impactful here.

Because of our size, and because of London’s unique, gritty atmosphere, it’s more meaningful.

London is a corporate city in a lot of ways –a lot of corporate enterprises, factories, malls, corporate restaurants. These corporations have abandoned the downtown core, saturated the suburbs, but there’s an entire populace of working-class people who make the city run, a working class that keeps these restaurants staffed, that keeps our city working. And punk music always needs to be connected to the working class. When it’s not, it’s no longer authentic; it’s a product. Those are the people who gather here, those are who we’re here for. 

As the bar grows, how do you plan to balance keeping the space accessible and affordable for local DIY promoters while ensuring the venue itself remains sustainable?

The premise is that we always want it to be ground up – that is our hope as we build this culture in the city. I want a noise show with a full room, but I’ll book it either way. I just want to see the art happen, and I want to contribute to the legacy of noise music in the city.

We have such a rich history of noise music here, due to the Nihilist Spasm Band and the Regionalist Movement. It’s baked into London’s punk culture. But I want to be at a point where it becomes more sustainable and viable because it’s part of the fabric of the scene, not just the fringes. In a world that is always going to be more expensive than the working class makes, it’s important that we always lead with it being affordable. That’s why we have NOTAFLOF (No one Turned Away for Lack of Funds) as an evolution of PWYC (Pay What You Can). I would rather have you in the room than your ten dollars. I want to start offering larger events which will mean larger ticket prices, but hopefully with the support of a blooming scene and maybe some sweet government money – some grants – I can go a little farther. I always want to be able to offer local tier shows and DJ nights. If this place becomes only touring bands for thirty dollars, we’ve lost sight of what we’re about. The goal is to always include and prioritize the local scene and then have keystone events that might be a little pricier. There are so many ways to get into a show for free — if you work doors, if you go postering. I’ve even told people if they can bring three friends who can pay, then I’ll get you in free. I just want bodies in here celebrating our culture. If someone can’t get in, there are a ton of ways to get in that make the space better, and you get to go in for free, so you have ownership of the event.

You’re a part of it at that point, and you’ve given a little bit of yourself to the space.

Yeah! The scene is most powerful when it is run by the people who participate in it, not when it is a booking agency or LiveNation, or something like that, dictating and pricing what the culture should be.

Given London’s history of losing punk and DIY spaces such as The Embassy and Call the Office, what can our community do to strengthen and further entrench these spaces into our everyday lives? What can we as community members do to make it last?

Take ownership of it. Take ownership over the future of the space so it becomes sustainable. Call the Office was able to last 30-40 years, and it did music events as the York Hotel did before that. The Embassy was around for nearly 50 years because people were deeply passionate about the space, in addition to a deeply passionate group of people behind the scenes, steering the direction. It’s about getting involved. If you want to see a queer grindcore [band], book them. Be the reason. Or even better, start one. If you want to support your favourite band coming to town, poster around town so no one misses it and the room gets full. Be the reason a bunch of people gather.

I love how many community members have contributed to raising awareness of these events. Knowing it’s difficult to get people to leave their enclaves, I really appreciate the community members who have stepped forward to promote these events and gatherings. I love walking around the core and knowing what comes next. This way people know there are options other than staying in and endlessly scrolling their phone.

I’m a deep believer in the culture of postering – creating physical media and creating an archive of these posters. I’ve designed as many of the posters for these events as I can because I love poster art. I try not to compare cities, but I love walking through Montreal and seeing rows of event posters on every storefront and [every] telephone pole plastered with art made by a human being.  I love this physical media.


There’s something very special about ephemerality, isn’t there?

We talk about a show poster like it’s an ephemeral thing: you do a poster, the poster goes up, the event happens, and the art is dead. But the truth is it lives on, on the wall of a teenager’s room, it exists in the archive of a small DIY gallery, it exists in a zine. We talk about how the internet is forever, but the internet is not forever. The internet is new, and vast, and things get lost easily. Some of my favourite bands in the world, I cannot find their music for the life of me, and they were only around ten years ago. To me, that cassette, vinyl, poster, is forever. To circle back to the question, the best way to get involved is to take ownership over the archiving. People like Nat Bravo, Justice Bekke, like Ruby, show up and document the happenings. Every time that somebody documents and makes a zine, that’s evidence that queer culture exists, that a counterculture existed in that year, in our city. So show up, take pictures, start a blog, start a distro. There are so many ways to get involved. Start a band.  If you don’t play an instrument, draw a poster. If you don’t draw, take pictures. Organize a queer potluck. It’s all part of something larger.

It’s part of our culture that’s constantly growing and changing. It may not even seem like something right now, but there will come a time, years down the line, where we’ll want to be able to see that growth and be able to say ‘What a unique moment in London’s life.’ Taking ownership of that is part of making sure it lasts, right?

It’s one of the things I struggle with and have a fear around. My focus is that I am great at making it happen, but I’m not good at archiving. That is not my strong suit. It needs to be on other people to document these things and take these things from ephemeral to permanent.

What does community mean to you?

It used to mean just going to a punk show, a gathering of friends. Now it’s about showing up for those friends until you get to see them grow as people. It’s hosting enough shows to see them going from shaking with fear for their first time on stage to now fronting a band and being a total rock star up on that stage. It’s not just the show, it’s the human element. It’s the sitting on the sidewalk for the last two hours after the show has ended because you don’t want to stop talking with your friends, so you’re sitting and smoking and laughing. Those are the things that define it for me, how we show up for each other at the gathering space and beyond. Being queer is a radical thing in a world that doesn’t want you, that desires you to be so definable. I feel it’s inevitable that we’re all going to change the world a little bit. Perhaps not the whole world, but our little piece of it. That’s how I think of community.


Everything Comes Back Around: In Conversation with Niloufar Fallahfar

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

Interview by Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaky Boundaries: In Conversation with Isabella Covert

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

By Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Femme Demo: In Conversation with Sam Grabowska

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

By Julia Betts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB: Fight or flight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

JB: Oh, it was too feminine to them?

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB: Thank you for speaking with me today!

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

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_.

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.

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

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

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.

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 24th.  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.

Ayanna Dozier on the Sacred Labour of a Whore

Installation view from Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You by Ayanna Dozier at Microscope Gallery. Photo courtesy of Microscope Gallery.

By Gladys Lou

Ayanna Dozier is an artist, writer, and scholar who approaches sex work as a sacred form of labour. For her, erotic labour is not just performed, it is studied, historicized, and positioned alongside artistic and mystical practices as a site of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional expertise. Drawing on biblical narrative, Black feminist theory, and personal experience, Dozier traces the porous boundaries between submission and autonomy, resistance and care. Her work asks: Why is spiritual labour exalted, domestic labour expected, and erotic labour condemned, especially when all three are so often enacted by the same gendered and racialized bodies?

In a scene from Dozier’s recent narrative short film Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water, the dominatrix Anna jokingly asks her friend Danielle over the phone, “What would men do without us?” to which Danielle wryly replies, “What would their wives and girlfriends do without us?”Across Dozier’s work, women’s bodies glided through moments of prayer, performance, and cathartic releases: whipping, crawling, and pole dancing. Their movements are at once solemn and seductive, devotional and defiant, collapsing the gateway between the holy and the wild, between heaven and hell.

I first encountered Dozier’s work in her 2025 solo exhibition Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You at Microscope Gallery. Projected in loops of film and housed within cathedral-shaped frames, the installation, Doing It for Daddy, staged a sensual encounter where Christian fundamentalist iconography, BDSM aesthetics, and intimate postures become all entangled.

The architectural motif of the cathedral frame operates more as a formal device than a spiritual symbol. Dozier remixes these ornamental silhouettes, often used to house pious slogans in evangelical décor, and fills them with scenes of erotic gesture. By doing so, she stages a confrontation between the idealized, sacred image projected onto figures like Mary Magdalene and the lived realities of labour performed through and upon women’s bodies.

In our conversation, we discuss the politics of women’s labour, the history and nuances of sex work, and why deploying the term whore, for its ability to cut through identity categories and recognize those outside of solidarity groups, can reveal the realities of labour that are often silenced or marginalized.

Ayanna Dozier, “Doing it for Daddy,” 2024, 16mm film, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York.

Gladys: Your work addresses multiple forms of labour, from sexual, spiritual, to gendered. Can you speak more about how you understand labour in relation to the body, particularly as a form of devotion and resistance? How do you personally define labour within your practice?

Ayanna: To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes from Angela Davis, referencing Marx: labour is like fire, it’s tangibly felt, but you can’t grasp it. I think that resonates with how I’ve been thinking about labour, especially as it relates to the gendered body. This came through strongly in my last solo show.

I’m interested in the contradictions around labour and how they manifest through gender. In the church, for example, prayer is considered a woman’s labour because it’s biblical. As women, you’re not afforded much autonomy beyond that. In the church I grew up in, it was heavily structured so that if you were an unmarried woman, you’d become a “prayer warrior.” Men could be pastors; They could take on public-facing roles. But women? You got married, you had babies, and your role in the church centered around reproduction. So, what is a woman’s labour to God beyond childbirth? It’s prayer.

And I took that very seriously. I was good at praying. But here’s the contradiction: as someone in a gendered body, regardless of whether I fit into mainstream beauty standards or not, my body was still seen through a sexualized lens. The very labour I was encouraged to do — being on my knees, getting into a state of spiritual ecstasy — was seen as inappropriate or even erotic, so then you’re punished for it.

That tension between condemnation and ecstasy is what undergirded the exhibition. What does it mean to be punished for the kind of transcendence your body seeks? You’re conditioned to pursue it, but also forbidden from fully accessing it. That’s where I find an important analogy to sex work.

Sex is labourious. It requires skill. We live in a sex-negative society, one that doesn’t advocate for sexual education. People are expected to enter these mostly heterosexual unions already knowing how to have sex, how to please their partners, how to keep them satisfied. Meanwhile, sex workers develop actual skill sets. They edify the body. You have to be deeply perceptive as a sex worker, not just “do” sex, but understand it, guide someone through intimacy, through shame, through discomfort, toward pleasure.

And yet, we don’t consider that labour. We dismiss it, we vilify it. Even though it’s something we claim to value within romantic partnerships, we undermine those who practice it professionally. That contradiction between sex, service to God, and gendered labour is what the exhibition tried to explore. It’s like, you can do it, but don’t do it too well. Because then it becomes too provocative, too threatening. And once it becomes threatening, it must be condemned. It’s always this constant push and pull.

Detail view from Genesis 38:14-15, 2025 by Ayanna Dozier. 16 mm film still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: In your artist talk, you described God as a ‘non-consensual dom. ‘ Could you elaborate on what this metaphor conveys about the dynamics of authority and submission?

Ayanna: As individuals, as human beings, I don’t think subjugation is necessarily a bad thing. History shows that people have long craved subjugation. Look at kings and monarchies. There’s something innate in the human experience about wanting to surrender to something larger than yourself. That can be ecstatic, even transformative. There’s beauty in being able to serve or to devote yourself to something that claims to know better, to offer relief from suffering.

What I challenge is when institutions weaponize that impulse, when submission becomes a tool of control or degradation, particularly in how it interacts with self-worth. That’s what I wanted to explore in the exhibition: this tension between ecstatic devotion and systemic cruelty, especially for women. There’s something deeply erotic and spiritually resonant about prayer. And when you strip away the dogma, it’s not unlike meditation, quieting the body, focusing the mind, speaking your desires and intentions out loud.

But within the church, you’re often taught that you’re undeserving of the very connection you’re trying to cultivate. In the New Testament, especially in Paul’s letters to early churches, two to Corinth (1 & 2 Corinthians) and two to Timothy (1 & 2 Timothy), there’s this recurring emphasis on human unworthiness (“You have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body” 1 Corinthians 6:20). You’re devoting your time, and yet constantly reminded that you don’t belong, that you’re lucky to be here.

That’s where the phrase I used, calling God a “non-consensual dom,” comes from. It’s funny, but it’s also serious. What does it mean to be conditioned to want to serve, but told that your service is never good enough? That you’re inherently unworthy, and that’s the whole point?

Detail view from Doing it for Daddy, 2024 by Ayanna Dozier.16 mm film still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: In your work Doing it for Daddy, you’ve depicted the ritual of anointing pastors as emotionally intense, even carrying an erotic charge. How do you approach the balance between sensuality and spiritual devotion, especially when these acts are typically presented as sacred? Also, how do the differing biblical accounts of anointing inform your film?

Ayanna: Biblically, there are contradictions, especially in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all recount more or less the same events from Christ’s life and miracles, but from different perspectives. Each writer brings their own interpretation of what they’re witnessing. Take the scene of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus: it appears in all four Gospels, but with striking differences.

In Matthew, it’s a single, almost chaste verse: she anoints his feet and gifts the perfume. The act becomes more embodied and intimate with each retelling (this also changes depending on the translation but for this purpose I am speaking of the New Kings James Version). Mark focuses on the cost of the perfume and Peter’s disapproval. In John, it’s Mary of Bethany anointing Christ’s feet and wiping them with her hair. By the time we reach Luke, the account expands to four or five verses. Luke portrays a “sinful woman” performing the act with intense emotion, describing a woman crawling to Christ, her tears falling on his feet, pressing her cheek to them, pouring perfume, and drying them with her hair.

The act of anointing is devotional, but also, undeniably, erotic in its intimacy, especially in the way Luke and John describe it. That contradiction lives in the text itself. What’s considered sacred is so often also sensual, but the church can’t tolerate that ambiguity. That’s what I’m drawn to, biblically, visually, symbolically, and what I try to hold in my work. I like those contradictions, and I lean into them technically as well. That’s part of the surface gag of the film: it was shot in double 8mm, all in-camera, and purposefully constructed so that two simultaneous images oppose each other, printed onto 16mm film. This forces the audience to watch four projected images at once on a single strip, a construction meant to reveal the hypocrisy in all of it.

Gladys: Can you talk about some of the key inspirations and philosophical or cultural references that inform your work, especially how you engage with Christian narratives, and the portrayals of desire and self-love?

Ayanna: The Faust myth, sometimes it’s called Faustus, sometimes Mephistopheles, goes by different names depending on the version. It’s a very popular folktale: someone makes a deal with the devil in exchange for knowledge, power, or eternal life. In some versions, Mephisto is the name of the devil; in others, Faustus himself becomes a kind of devil figure. But at its core, the story is always about bartering with the devil for an extended or enhanced life, only to find that life ultimately unfulfilling.

It’s a very Christian kind of propaganda. The moral is always that true satisfaction comes not from surrendering to yourself or your flesh, but from surrendering to God. The flesh is weak. And what I love are the films that challenge that, suggesting this surrender to desire, to the body, to pleasure, can actually be a wondrous, fulfilling experience.

There’s a film by Jess Franco from 1968 called Succubus, though it also goes by the title Nymphomaniac in some versions. The protagonist is an S&M performance artist, doing bondage theater, and we come to realize that the devil is seducing her not to punish her, but to help her embrace her gifts: the power to dominate, to force submission, to destroy men. What he offers her is a life of philosophy and freedom: freedom from masculinity.

By the end of the film, she enters a dream state with the devil, who says something like, “My beautiful Faustian bride, now we will pursue earthly pleasures together.” And I love how that’s framed not as a tragedy, but as something positive. It’s a twist from the idea that spiritual servitude to God is the only “good life,” while you only get one life in the flesh.

There’s a term in Christian theology: homo incurvatus in se—a life turned inward. I used that phrase as a title for one of my artworks in the show. It’s considered a negative concept in Christianity, a threat to God, because it suggests centering the self over divine authority. Historically, Christian fundamentalism, via the Reformist doctrine, has often been against education, against art, against self-expression because these things open us up to our bodies, to each other, to difference.

There are many passages in the Bible that discourage empathy, even though people like to say, “But what about Christ’s teachings?” Christ’s compassion was conditional. He believed in forgiveness, yes, but only if you chose God. If you didn’t, you were damned to go to hell. That damnation was seen as justified. Pleasure, sex, and bodily joy—these things open us up. They make us more empathetic, more generous. And that is a threat to a religion built on servitude.

That’s what the Faustian parable warns against: don’t seek philosophy, don’t study knowledge, don’t write, don’t make art. The real purpose of life is to give yourself to God. And the greatest enemy in the Faust myth isn’t the devil, it’s self-love. That’s what I find so interesting, and what I try to explore in my work. The actual threat to Christianity isn’t the devil. It’s the question: What if we just love ourselves?

Ayanna Dozer. Detail view from Forgetting You is like Breathing Water, film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: In your recent short film, Forgetting You is like Breathing Water, there’s an overlap between physical intimacy and emotional vulnerability, especially in the final scene, where the man confesses his struggles to the dominatrix. Do you think sex work could be a form of therapy or self-reflection?

Ayanna: My clients often treated me like their therapist. It was shocking when I was 21 and had men in their fifties telling me about their marital problems. There’s a certain humour in that, because it’s a weird situation. I’m retired now, but I’m still doing research on it, and it hasn’t changed. My conversations with friends who are still in the industry reveal that it’s the same: clients unload and project so much onto you, and you have to be good at accepting that.

Then, it can feel like a type of therapy. It’s a job where you need to be okay with yourself because you’re dealing with people projecting their problems and opinions about you. I recently curated a film series at Anthology called Women, Workers, and Whores on Film. One of the shorts in the program, “Whore Writers” by Tall Milk, interviewed sex workers who are also writers about their experiences. One of them, Stoya, an infamous porn star, wrote a book called Philosophy of the Pussy, where she talks about having clients, mid-session, project their reasons as to why “[she] probably does this.” It’s messed up, but the point is, you have to understand that the sense of projection and entitlement is part of the job.

Sometimes, it has less to do with the physical act of sex and more to do with how you manage the emotional load and understand the root of your client’s issues. It’s like a therapist’s role, in a way. You use sex, which is broadly defined here because it happens in dominatrix sessions too, that do not center penetration, where it’s not always about physical pain, but rather a dynamic of control. It’s the same in escorting, which sometimes isn’t about sex at all but just being a companion for the night. It’s all part of the larger industry.

In this line of work, you have to figure out quickly what your goal is. Not just to get paid, but if it’s your day-to-day job, to get hired again. You need to understand when to break the script of what you thought your job was and adjust when doing the job. That’s what the film was getting at: a woman who is also in need of the type of care and consideration that she gives to her clients.

I don’t believe that gender and race are stable, singular categories to symbolize. And I don’t think being a “whore” is a stable category either.

 

Gladys: How did you approach bringing the complex emotional and power dynamics between the dominatrix and her client to life on screen, especially in portraying their connection while maintaining the boundaries of the work?

Ayanna: The film starts with her heartbroken, which is why we spend so much time with her in the beginning to give us a sense of her life outside of her job. Then, as her client talks, she realizes she understands exactly what he’s going through. She sympathizes with him. She understands the intersection of desire and loss that she, too, is experiencing. That’s why we get that flashback to her own breakup. She gives him both a spiritual and physical release, one that is traumatic to the body but mentally ecstatic.

I wanted to keep it clear in the film because, often, when sex workers are portrayed on screen by non-sex workers, they bond with their clients in a way that feels unrealistic. Like, “Call me by my real name.” In the film, even the client thinks her real name is Faith, but the audience knows it’s Anna because of her previous conversation with her friend. There’s still that boundary, that pretense, because safety comes first. But that boundary doesn’t make the experience any less real or impactful.

In other films, the sex worker might cry and say, “I’ve been heartbroken too,” but no, that’s not it. She’s still doing her job, but she also understands that he needs what she’s giving him because she, too, needs it. Whether he recognizes that as her bonding with him is beside the point. He gets what he needs, but she and the audience understand that she’s also connecting with him while keeping the structures of the job intact. He’s projecting onto her, and she’s projecting onto him.

And in the context of dominatrix work, or sex work in general, people often assume that power dynamics don’t shift, but they do. Power changes all the time. There are so many negative assumptions about sex work, and in the past, I used to feel like I had to defend it. But now, I’m tired of having to do that. Sometimes, it’s messy, but that doesn’t invalidate the work.

Ayanna Dozer. Detail view from Whore in the House of the Lord, 2024 by Ayanna Dozier. 16 mm film still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: I’m curious about the use of the word “whore” in the title of your film, A Whore in the House of the Lord. It’s a term that’s often weaponized to degrade women, so why did you use it in your work? I also know that in your art practice and community work, you’ve encountered many confrontations. How do these experiences shape your views on the intersections of race, gender, and sex work?

Ayanna: In my opinion, the term “sex worker” doesn’t quite capture everything. It’s a useful way to describe the industry to people outside of it, and it’s certainly better than the police term “prostitute.” Some sex workers may call themselves prostitutes, but that term originates from law enforcement. It’s always been tossed around by the police, and even though it’s sometimes embraced in a more affectionate sense within the community, it’s still loaded.

I like the term “sex worker” in the context of organizing, especially around labour. But let me tell you: the number of people who have screamed in my face, yelled at me, or kicked me out of labour and leftists organizing spaces because I bring up sex work is a lot. I had an experience three months ago where this guy just turned bright red and went off about how sex workers are basically getting paid to be raped and they have no agency. He was like, “They’re all trafficked. How could you advocate for them? They need to be in jail.”

It’s encounters like that which have made me double down on the term “whore.” Because no matter what, whether I’m retired or not, in these encounters, I’m always reminded, as journalist Melissa Gira Grant says in Playing the Whore (2014), that once you’re a whore, you’re always a whore. You can’t escape that. You can’t fit into a neoliberal framework of labour rights because people in those spaces will remind you that you’re a whore. Using the term “whore” allows us to cut through identity and understand that it’s a specific configuration of experience that’s only fully understood by other whores.

Gladys: Can you expand on what the term represents in terms of identity and labour within the sex work community?

Ayanna: I don’t believe that gender and race are stable, singular categories to symbolize. And I don’t think being a “whore” is a stable category either. Deploying that term gets at the disenfranchisement and displacement that happen across those gender and racial divisions.

Because I exist at two visible intersections of Blackness and gender, I’ve always felt dissatisfied by this idea that I should mobilize around a shared experience of a universal Black womanhood. That doesn’t take into account my light skin or being cis and thus that I’m perhaps not the best person to speak on behalf of dark skin or trans women as part of that assumed universal marker of Black womanhood. It also doesn’t address the divisions within and how some Black cis women can be incredibly transphobic and conservative.

When I start to frame the work that I do as a “Black whore,” it allows the audience to grasp these very violent fractures across identity. Looking at Black whores reveals some very poignant disenfranchisements of Black women at the margins like how Black trans women are disproportionately affected by sex work.

For example, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey from 2015 and the Visual AIDS Day Without Out pamphlet: Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings document from 2017 estimated that roughly 40-50% of Black trans women have done sex work and often take up the labour because of gender discrimination in the workplace. A report by Amnesty International indicated that 40% of people detained in the United States for sex work are Black women. An average of 60-80% of street-based sex workers are Black women, according to this decriminalization report, street-based reporting by Coyote based in Rhode Island, and Melissa Gira Grant’s statistics in her 2014 book, Playing the Whore, and across multiple news articles. Hacking/Hustling also outlines some of the policing towards street-based sex workers with regards to race.

This is why I deploy the term “whore” both in solidarity, having been one, and as a recognition that other terms don’t allow us to get to the heart of the matter. We can use other terms and hope someone will see our humanity, but they probably won’t.

Ayanna Dozier, “A Whore in the House of the Lord,” 2024, 16mm film (still). Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York

Gladys: You referred to your work Genesis 38:14–15 as a “partially non-consensual collaboration” with James Turrell. Could you explain what you meant by that and why you reference his work? And considering you weren’t allowed to perform at the original site, what does that reveal about institutional control, power, and exclusion in relation to bodies and visibility?

Ayanna: I like James Turrell’s work, but I’m also critical because he represents a broader issue in the art world: white male artists often acquire public land for private projects. Most of his Skyspaces are on private land, and Roden Crater is an example. So, these are not truly public spaces.

The only Skyspace Turrell has that’s genuinely public is the one in Chicago, owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)’s architecture school. But it became “too public” when unhoused people started sleeping there. As a result, it’s the only Skyspace Turrell has more or less disowned. It’s not even listed on his official website anymore.

All his other Skyspaces, including the one I shot at the Walker Art Center, are private. This ties into what we call the “public sphere,” which speaks to the privatization of spaces meant to be public but, in reality, exclude certain groups: unhoused people, people using substances, those with mental illnesses, and sex workers. That’s what I find interesting about Turrell’s Skyspaces: they are part of this idea of the public sphere, but the only one that’s truly public is the one he has abandoned.

Access is an important issue. What does it mean for me to visit a site on public land that’s historically connected to sex workers? Turrell calls his Skyspaces “holy” and “spiritual,” and I agree with that. But I also see erotic labour as sacred and transformative, and in that sense, you’re literally on territory that I feel connected to more than you do.

Most modern art buildings and districts occupy land with deep ties to sex work. As Anne Gray Fischer writes in her book The Streets Belong to Us, many downtown centers in the U.S. are built on land from which sex workers, often racialized, were displaced, arrested, and removed. For example, the area around Gansevoort and Washington Streets, where the Whitney Museum is now, was once where Black trans sex workers worked. Times Square and Boston’s South End were also sex work areas. The South End now houses the ICA.

The title of the piece references Genesis 38:14-15, which tells the story of the first sex worker in the Bible. She’s kept outside the city, yet her labour is essential to the city’s wellbeing. Using Turrell’s Skyspace alongside this history highlights the larger forces of modernity, architecture, gentrification, and erasure.

This interview was edited for clarity and length. You can find more of Ayanna’s work on her website or Instagram.