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 and inspired by it, they 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.

Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? In Conversation with Furqan Mohamed

Exhibition visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Interview by Adi Berardini

What can our fears tell us about one another? Could embracing our fears instead of keeping them at arm’s length connect us closer together?

Furqan Mohamed curated the exhibition Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? as part of this year’s Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts presented with Charles Street Video, featuring artists Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor. The exhibition asks what we are afraid of in the pursuit of justice for all workers and how workers are often painted to be monstrous or terrifying under the logic of capitalism. What does it look like to embrace the monstrosity? Through a multi-sensorial approach, Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? touches upon how labour can leave one feeling like a ghost and a shell of an embodied human. Together, Mohamed and the artists explore the haunting in the fight towards liberation in a labour landscape steeped in white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, and imagine what mending this could look like.

Furqan Mohamed is a writer, educator, and arts worker from Toronto. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, Maisonneuve, mimp magazine, Canthius, and The Local, where she was an inaugural Journalism Fellow. Her digital chapbook, “A Small Homecoming,” was published by Party Trick Press in 2021. She is also the creator of the “Who’s Afraid?” reading series, which shares a December birthday with her.

Furqan Mohamed at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Adi Berardini:  How did your curatorial vision for Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? take shape? How does it relate you to your Who’s Afraid? poetry and writing series?

Furqan Mohamed:  I started with the reading series where writers that I know or writers that I want to know and work with are invited to share work based on the themes of fear. So, whether they are afraid or if they’re the ones who are used to being feared. We’ve had maybe a dozen events so far.

I think a lot of racialized folks, a lot of Black and Indigenous people, and women and queer folks, know what it’s like to be the object of other people’s fears. I think especially as a Muslim living in a post-9/11 world, it’s hard to not talk about fear in relation to being feared. Or what it’s like to have fears that are not always honoured or not always recognized or fears that are seen as less important than those of others. It’s the question of “Who exactly gets to be afraid?” And the response was beautiful. So many forms of writing came out of that. There were poets, people who wrote for the first time and shared in front of an audience for the first time in our series of flash fiction short stories, really beautiful pieces of prose.

I was blown away by how immediate and visceral it was. Everyone was just like, “Yes, I wanna talk about fear. I’m afraid all the time.” And for me, I think that resonated. But also, because fear is often so discussed as something to overcome, people are always thinking of how they’re going to face their fears and how they’re going to overcome them. And there’s less of an emphasis on just honouring them or sitting with them and naming them and being like, “I’m terrified.” And we’ve been given every reason to be terrified in a time of genocide, and a time of climate catastrophe, of late-stage capitalism. Seeing that I work with children, [it’s the feeling of] being afraid of what we’re leaving them and afraid of the treatment of our elders who are still with us. I think sometimes a crucial step in organizing is to be able to acknowledge that because you can’t gather with people or work with people unless you’re willing to accept all of them, including their fears.

Fear is a weaponizing tactic used against people. Fear has been often used to prevent people from gathering, from seeing one another, from being with one another. It’s used to halt and stifle and stop people from connection. I think that investigating that is also important. The reading series is fun for me to honour a literary tradition as a writer and a reader. Octavia Butler very much comes to mind to focus on, whether through poetry or through fantastical fictions.

Then I had been working or in conversation with Mayworks Festival. I had a writing poetry workshop activity at the last festival last year, and people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities, and various relationships and experiences with writing and poetry came out. We had written this collective poem together on this super tall piece of fabric canvas. People were starting and stopping at different points on the banner and coming up against each other in beautiful ways. I remember being moved by that and appreciative because it was different than our traditional poetry reading. Even though I’m coming from spoken word and poetry and oral performance, there was that give and take with an audience. There’s a relationship there. But this one was even more involved, where after I was done connecting fear and poetry and labour, attendees then started to speak back to me and respond to these prompts and speak to one another on this living document.

Visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

This collective poem took things to a whole new level for me. I learned so much going from a traditional literary series that I still love, and I’m interested in, to a more involved kind of collective practice, to then being asked to apply as a curator as this year’s festival took shape. That was like a whole new kind of learning curve because I come from a teaching and facilitating background and then I come from a reading, performing, and writing background. I consider things like beauty, space, and material, but I’m currently in the pocket of Big Child.™ I’m not someone who makes things with their hands unless you count like craft in a kindergarten classroom or a grade four or five science or social studies project.

When it comes to a practice in visual arts, I come more from like a scholarly and appreciative lens. I’m the person who writes about them; I’m not the person who considers them in this space or curates them. And then I was suddenly in that role and having a wonderful time because certain things are quite similar. For instance, when you’re setting up for a reading, you think about where the mic stand is and where the chairs are going to be, and accessibility and where people are going to sit and hear you from, and in a classroom, you consider space and place.

When you invite people to listen to a reading, you do a lot of the prefacing for them. At every Who’s Afraid? I explain where I’m coming from. I talk about Edward Said and Orientalism, I talk about Octavia Butler. I talk about what we’re afraid of, what fear means to me, and then the writers come up and there’s a throughline. But at a visual arts show, there’s a curatorial essay, but I’m not there. When people come in to see the show, the artists aren’t there. People just come in as they please. They may or may not finish the essay. They will read Farah’s poem on the wall. They will listen to Saysah’s soundscape. They will read and admire Nahomi’s collage. But where they take it, there’s less holding my hand and following me as we think this through together. It is left to so much interpretation and I think that impacted that transition for me going from a reading series to a visual arts show, but it was a transition that I enjoyed.

Exhibition visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Saysah. Image credit: Blue MBK.

The exhibition weaves together themes of alienation, liberation, and how labour can leave us feeling like a ghost in our own bodies. How did you approach curating works that engage these complex ideas?

For me, it was important for the show to make people feel aware of themselves. I think sometimes this can be the aim of the artist and curation, and it can be beautiful. However, sometimes you can get lost in the work and you as the subject kind of disappear into the world that the artist and the curator in the space have made for you.

I wanted it less to be about making you disappear and forget where you are and who you are for a second. Less about escapism and more about “I’m really aware of my own body right now and myself and my relation to this space.” Immediately as soon as you go in, the space is dark and you are aware of the light changing and your eyes adjusting, and the sound immediately through Saysah and Farah and the curtains. You’re aware of entry and where you can and can’t go or where you can and can move through. I think that my first consideration was this and the other themes were able to flow through that. You can’t think about alienation without first thinking about yourself and about where you are in the space that you’re in.

Artists Nahomi Amberber (left) and Saysah (right) at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

I think that the fun thing about fear is that it does make us uncomfortable sometimes. When you are uncomfortable, you ask where that is coming from and then there’s that search for comfort. That’s where a lot of interesting opportunities can happen and can arise. Nahomi and Saysah are both talented artists in their own ways. They’re also partners in real life, which is a cool element of the show, to see in their process. They both wanted to talk about isolation and about how fear can make us feel separate. They also wanted to talk about how collective fears give people a reason to come together, how fear is both a halting and mobilizing force and what that means for labour justice in particular. Nahomi and Saysah drove home the storytelling that we do around fear in their work. Whether it’s a parent to a child or an elder in an organizing space to a young person, they [demonstrate] the warnings that we give one another, and the cautionary tales that we tell. Often, that is meant to encourage and guide people as they organize against injustice, but it is also a real source of anxiety and fear.

A visitor at the the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Nahomi Amberber. Image credit: Blue MBK.

Nahomi cites their father and the stories they grew up hearing as part of their collage. I think those feelings are embodied and showcased by Saysah’s work with the projection and the soundscape that takes over the space because you are looking at them manipulating their own face and body in different ways that make you aware of your own. It makes you conscious of [how] fear manifests itself and where it comes from.

One of my favorite elements is this peephole. There’s a door in Charles Street Video with a peephole, like one in an apartment door, and a monitor behind it. As soon as you look in, these eyes are looking right back at you and a pair of headphones with some sound that Saysah included. For me, that speaks to that connection. Whether it’s Nahomi talking about their father and them, or it’s in an organizing space between one another as comrades, or people who work together, or it’s a stranger at a protest that you lock eyes with.

I might be afraid of you, and you might be afraid of me, and we might be terrified of one another. But I need you, and you can’t look away from me, and I can’t look away from you.

I think it talks to this forced feeling that we have no choice. We’re all afraid and have to be looking at one another—There’s accountability in that. I might be afraid of you, and you might be afraid of me, and we might be terrified of one another. But I need you, and you can’t look away from me, and I can’t look away from you. As terrifying as it is part of that collective spirit also comes in with the overhead projection that Saysah has installed as well, where people are invited to move the elements around on the overhead projector and answer some of the prompts or perhaps draw some cutouts and leave them for someone else to play around with, that kind of collaborative process with fear as well. I might not understand everything you’re afraid of, and you might not understand everything I’m afraid of, but I have to sit with these feelings regardless, and I need to be aware of them. Sometimes you really need someone else to spark that awareness in you.

Lastly, I think Farah’s poem ties everything together beautifully when she uses the old fable of a sheep and a wolf to explain the dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor, like a worker and a person in a relationship with them through an oppressive or dominating way but uses this language of care and false comfort. Like you don’t have any reason to be afraid, your fears aren’t real, and you should find comfort and solace in this unjust system. It’s very seductive with fear. It’s completely human and I don’t blame people sometimes for giving into fear a little bit. Maybe not siding with the wolf, but finding comfort or hiding behind the wolves in their lives, whether those wolves are big or everyday and small because fear can do that to people.

But as far as a kind of cautionary fable poem, I think it really interrogates that and asks us to think beyond that false comfort and understand that we have one another and have no reason to be afraid of one another. But that, of course, requires us to acknowledge our fears in the first place.

I think with the different sorts of elements of visual elements or sound in this space, you can hear Farah’s poem in a sound shower. You have to get to a certain point in the space to hear it. Then, when you step away, you are again surrounded and bathed in a soundscape. There are lots of times, whether it’s with the curtains or with the sound or with the headphones playing with public and private, the individual versus the collective is what it means to address and find comfort in the false stories that we tell around fear of the sheep and the wolf or the true stories that we hear from our elders, from Nahomi and her father. [It explores] the kind of discomfort that comes with fear, but also the childlike wonder of hiding under a blanket with a flashlight and being super scared. This is scary, but we’re okay. People were doing that together with the overhead projector at the opening night and revert[ed] to a very childlike state.

I also think that there’s a base human emotion around fear that I think encourages people to revert to a kind of innocent, vulnerable version of themselves that I think then is receptive to things like collaboration, receptive to things like a collective response to fear, and finding comfort in one another in that way. I think there’s so much happening all at once, which you hope for in a visual experience and art exhibition.

Poet Farah Ghafoor at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Each artist—Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor—brings a distinct practice rooted in personal, political, and sensory experience. How did their individual voices shape the curatorial direction and what dialogues emerged between their works? I think you’ve touched base on this already, but if there’s anything you’d like to add feel free.

Farah is a talented poet and has read for Who’s Afraid? before, during the second or third event that we had. She often considers capitalism, worth, and value in her work. And I knew that I wanted to work with her because she was already exploring those themes in her poetry. And she comes from the finance world because of her day job. The ways that we talk about human life in relation to the value of a dollar. How much a life is worth and how much a human being is worth for things like insurance. I think the Mayworks building in Toronto is neighbours to the Workplace Compensation Board. The people who compensate workers or lawyers for people to get compensated for an accident on the job. They will help you figure out how much your leg is worth or how much your arm is worth if you injure yourself.

Oh, that’s ominous.

I know. I think about how haunting that is and how ominous that is. And there was a previous show, I think it was last year or the year before that talked about how much a body is worth and more explicitly explored that question.

I remember hearing that and thinking about how disembodying that is and how quickly one can turn into a zombie or a person who is no longer full, but a collection of parts valued based on use. Who decides what use looks like and what is valuable and what isn’t? How could you ever possibly quantify what a human body and a human being is worth? But people do that.

I remember speaking with Farah about how that kind of system is then normalized quietly in a subtle way. We all have to get up for work everyday and participate in the system that is willing to dispose of us when we are no longer useful. We’ll often provide these kinds of false concessions and false comforts to keep us satiated so that we don’t engage in acts of resistance or so we don’t question these systems, and we don’t work together to create new ones. And I think narrative and storytelling are so important. And that story that capitalism tells us about how much we are “worth,” and how some people are worthless. And how we are only worthy or become worth something when we engage in X, Y, Z, or that our labour is not ours and belongs to someone else.

That narrative is a very real and strong one. The state tells stories and capitalism tells stories, and it tells these stories to keep us in place. And then you have these alternative stories, right? This world-building has to happen. There’s this adrienne maree brown quote that I love where she says that “organizing is like science fiction.”1 Like you do kind of have to bring people where you are to believe them so that they believe you.

Whether it’s imagining abolition, imagining a free Palestine, or imagining what it would look like to house everyone in the city. Or what it would look like for everyone to have a living wage what it would look like to not give in to Amazon and these big guys that think that we need them more than they need us. That takes quite a lot of storytelling to bring people there. It takes a lot of narrative-building and a lot of world-building that requires a lot of care at the same time.

And Nahomi and Saysah also bring that forward with their works, whether it’s the sharing of the intergenerational poem that Nahomi embroidered on fabric. I think about embroidery and textile work as being this very traditional form of labour, often done by women, particularly marginalized women, and racialized women. And what it means to sit somewhere and stitch something over and over and how that repetition is determined to tell that story. Like, I’m going to sit here and I’m going to weave and I’m going to thread and I’m going to commit this story that my father told me to textile because it means so much to me—I want people to come and be involved and be in this story with me and experience it with me. And the collaging of that photo over again, this beautiful family photo in different frames. I think that speaks to honouring and committing of memory of not being willing to let go of this ghost or this narrative.

And with Saysah’s projections, it’s the only light emitting in this space which is important because it is dark sort of everywhere, except the small lights used to light the poems. Most of the light in the room because it’s dark, is coming from the projections to call and pull people in. But also, to ground people and make them aware of themselves when they’re engaging with these stories to be very present. When they go to play with the overhead projector, I think people then take that awareness and are in the space together contributing to the creation of a counter-narrative. Another kind of campfire story that we tell one another in the pursuit of labour justice.

Visitors at the the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Saysah. Image credit: Blue MBK

You already beautifully weave your influences throughout. But who are some other artists or writers or thinkers who have influenced you in thinking the thinking behind the exhibition?

I have a poem on my phone that I want to pull up, so I don’t forget.

The poem is “12 Questions” by Bhanu Kapil. She asks:

Number one, who are you and whom do you love?

Two, where did you come from? How did you arrive?

Three. How will you begin?

Four. How will you live now?

Five. What is the shape of your body?

Six. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

Seven. What do you remember about the earth?

Eight. What are the consequences of silence?

Nine. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

Ten. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

Eleven. How will you have you prepared for your death?

Twelve. What would you say if you could?2

All of those questions that the poem asks are what I want people to ask when they’re at the show, of themselves, of their neighbour. It’s a poem that I think about so often. But I also think about, for me as a Black writer as a person concerned with subjectivity, what makes a person denied their personhood and what are the things that people need?

I think a lot about beauty, which I think you also have to do as an artist. And about how fear is often an ugly thing. Whether it’s being made to feel ugly under the gaze of someone else, to be watched, or to feel like something is just undesirable to talk about. A fear that’s just too ugly to even bring up or have a conversation about. I’m interested in that no longer being the case. I don’t want us to be afraid of watching; I don’t want us to be afraid of looking.

I want us to look at each other, whether it’s looking at the peephole in the eyes or staring back at you, or you’re looking at another person who’s come in to see the show at the same time. I don’t want us to think of our fears as being ugly or undesirable things. They’re important, they’re valuable. They’re like a guide, a talisman. Our fears are sacred and important. So yes, that Bhanu Kapil poem, Edward Said, always Octavia Butler. And then I think Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe always and Dionne Brand, always reading Dionne Brand.

How do you envision the exhibition inspiring viewers to reimagine and reflect on their own relationship to labour and work?

Like I said earlier, I want people to be aware of themselves when they go to the show, and to be very internal and reflective. I also want people to know that while we are not our jobs, while we are not our work, while we are people first and we have value outside, work is often the first place people can become radicalized and become acutely aware of their own conditions and then be able to form solidarity with people. Whether it’s immediately in their own workspace, in their field of work, in their kind of labour whether that’s in a union or not, or in the pursuit of one or international. [It’s] understanding how different tactics of oppression often are linked in the sense that the same people make and purchase the same weapons that are used against incarcerated folks here and then incarcerated folks in Palestine, or people suffering in Kashmir or Sudan or Congo. [Realizing] the narrative in stories that are told against or used to justify the suffering of Indigenous and Black people across the world.

I think labour justice in particular is this special thing because it encompasses so many other justices, like labour justice is a racial justice. It is a gender justice. It is climate justice. And I think this exhibition makes people think about their own workplaces. Whether you’re a writer and you’re signing on or an artist and you’re signing on to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), or it’s making you think about Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) or it’s making you think about if you’re afraid to say Palestine in your workplace.

Are you afraid to ask your colleagues about what recourses you have if you experience sexual violence or wage theft in your place of work? And who can you turn to, and what’s stopping you, perhaps from asking for more for what you deserve? What’s stopping you from divesting from unethical practices or creating a new ethical way of existing with your neighbours, with yourself, with folks around the world? I would hope that that’s what people can take away from the show is an acute awareness of themselves in relation to where they work, how they work, and what possibilities there are to organize.

One of the things that I love is when I go to a protest and I see the teachers or the nurses contingent or the health care workers contingent. Or on the back of the Mayworks postcards, there’s all the union logos and numbers and locals. Or when you see different intergenerational workers and young workers connecting.

There is something that’s really intimate about labour. We are not our jobs, but we often identify with them quite a bit, and a lot of important relationships are made through our labour. I hope that people can experience that reflection internally and externally when they go to visit.

You can check out Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? at Charles Street Video until May 30th, 2025, as part of Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.

  1. adrienne maree brown, 2024. “all organizing is science fiction”, FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, Elizabeth M. Webb ↩︎
  2. Kapil, Bhanu. (2001). The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Kelsey Street Press.  ↩︎

The Weeds Always Come Back: An Interview with Laleh Motlagh

Laleh Motlagh. Installation image at Chicago Art Department, Image courtesy of the artist

By Samuel Schwindt

I clichély joke every Chicago “fools spring” that the perpetually pending warmth makes me a houseplant desperate for a little sunlight (to restore my sanity). I tossed this joke to Laleh Motlagh for the first time meeting her, unbeknownst to her prolific plant practice. Her solo exhibition at Chicago Art Department, Cultivating Dispersal, curated by Cecilia González Godino, arrived quickly after our first encounter.

The histories Motlagh contours are intricate and delicate. In her searching and longing for a plummeted past, her artworks become counter-monuments: antithetical structures of subversion, unpredictably rooted in her body and flora-heirlooms (house plants and weeds). I wanted to know from Motlagh, herself: how do the tendrils of our consciousnesses, collective or personal, invade place, time, and objects? And how do our memories of memories supplant?

Laleh Motlagh. Still image of video performance The Loss, courtesy of the artist.

In a homecoming to a mutated space, Untitled, Motlagh precariously filmed herself where her family home in Iran once stood (it was demolished by developers). In the sequel piece The Loss across the room, she wears the same all-white garment and scarf, now kneeling in her Chicago backyard. The scarf plays a major role: she says it ties back to the patriarchal society she grew up in, filtered through the layered oppressions against women in Iran. The video pair acts as a feedback loop.

Laleh Motlagh. Still image of video performance Untitled, courtesy of the artist.

Samuel Schwindt: What history could be there still if the house was plundered for development? What remains?

Laleh Motlagh: This house was where I was born and raised. That same year that my parents moved there, and I was born there, my father had planted three trees in front of the house. When I went back in December of 2024, I went and found the neighborhood, found the house, and one of the trees was still there, right? But the house isn’t.

It’s all that memory, that time that’s embedded in that tree, standing up.  I decided to stand in the video. The tree also has this form of standing.

This was very controversial because there are so many political issues in Iran now. There’s so much surveillance, especially regarding women. People are afraid of cameras.

Even [while I was] shooting this, the neighbor came out and started giving me a really hard time.

SS: I’m thinking a lot about the word “embodiment” with your work. The tree is still absorbing all the oxygen, the environmental factors of the surroundings as it grows and changes. You did that with your past in place and self, politically with Iran and inhabiting that history within your body.

LM: It’s migration. There’s always the question of where home is, right? And I feel like these videos really create this dialogue back and forth. And continue to wrestle with this idea of there it is. Is it there? Is it somewhere between?

Laleh Motlagh. Installation image of Untitled sculptures, Image courtesy of the artist

Contained in wood-plank frames and dangling from the ceiling, plant detritus swirls and shrugs. They become a simulacrum of plant boxes. The debris is from her backyard, and rather than discarding, she replaces weeding with harvesting and harnessing.

SS: Tell more about how you think conceptually about framing and its interaction with the plants?

LM:  It’s an ephemeral structure, but the frame is always going to be there. I don’t modify. I don’t transform, I don’t change it in any form or any shape. It stays as is, and then I bring it to the studio, I hang it — it dries.

And then when I install it, pieces fall off. It’s very much like a letting go process, right?  Even though structures come in, like with the house being demolished and rebuilt.

SS: Yes. Even if you pull up all the weeds in your backyard, they do always come back. That root structure is still there. While this is a fleeting gesture, it doesn’t have pessimism in it. These will come back in that space. Just as you returned to this space (gesturing to the video of Motlagh in Iran), it becomes a reminder of time again.

LM: And resilient. I think of this with women in Iran. How resistant and resilient they are, and how they continue to tackle and resist against oppression. They don’t get stopped.

There isn’t a stopgap. It’s like there’s a continuous pushing. In the fall of 2022, the Woman Life Freedom Movement, nationwide protests took place in Iran, which was against women’s compulsory hijabs. It still continues.

Even though with all the resistance, with all the oppressions, with all the surveillance and arrests, and execution of women in Iran or the Middle East, they really are incredibly resilient. And I sometimes find it hard to have that sort of resilience here.

A lot of times, I look at these entanglements, how they are structured, and how they hold themselves. And how they have this life cycle. That they die out and come back out, die out, and come back out every year after year. It just reminds me very much of that movement.

Laleh Motlagh. Quiet Chaos (lines), image courtesy of the artist.
Laleh Motlagh. Individual drawing in series Spring 2022 – Fall 2024, image courtesy of the artist.

In spring 2022, as the war in Eastern Europe began and as the world felt like it was unraveling, Motlagh turned to her potted plants in her house and studio. She drew them as a quiet form of connection, tracing their contained, melancholy presence. In the fall of 2024, she returned to the same drawings, layering gray over black.

In the back corner is Quiet Chaos (lines),  a cartographic tracing on paper is then secured sacredly in a frame. The drawing depicts two jade plants (one brought by her father when he immigrated, the other gifted to her years later in Chicago).

LM:  Again, it’s that displacement, that migration. Being in one pot and figuring out ways of a home, of survival. Can these two cultures, my two cultures, reside next to one another? What does that space feel like for me?

SS: It’s a gesture of archiving, too. But the drawings hammer in that when we remember things, we don’t remember the actual event. We have the memory of the memory of it. And there are constantly disguising layers.

But you’re not upset with that either. You’re finding beauty in that process and processing it.

LM: It’s very internal, but I am processing it.

—

Motlagh and I took a brief break from recording and meandered to a coffee shop down the street. While waiting for our order, she showed me an image of her as a child in Iran, beside a seemingly giant planter box in her living room, larger than her. The distortion in perspective stuck with me, from the small to the large: how things live in people’s minds, then the actual object or experience. I began recording again when we returned to Chicago Art Department.

SS: On our walk, you mentioned that your practice with plants is the personal made into the global.

LM:  They go across cultures, religions, and time, right? And again, it’s that kind of leveling of the playing field that they create for us and let us be in there. As I was saying earlier, plants teach us about ourselves if we have the patience to observe and learn from them, and not be so human-centric, and see other beings in our surroundings.

You can see more of Laleh Motlagh’s work on her website or Instagram.

Community and Softness: In Conversation with Soft Flirt

Alayna Hryclik of Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

By Étienne Lavallée

Soft Flirt is a project run by Alayna Hryclik out of London, Ontario. Alayna runs Soft Flirt, a printmaking, mural, and illustrative art practice built around concepts of softness, locality, body positivity, platonic relationships, and dark humor. She can be found on Instagram as @softflirt and her website at softflirt.ca.   

E: You just had a super successful Soft Fest. What does it mean to you to provide this creative space for Londoners right now?

A: I think that, for myself and my own artistic journey, community support has been essential for my own livelihood, for battling imposter syndrome, and for feeling supported and having a network of people who are not only working together but championing each other’s success. So, I think that entering my 8th year in business, Soft Fest has become important to me because I’ve had such success going to other people’s events and building community that way. I think it’s important for me now to start creating those spaces for other people, especially emerging artists, and to help continue to create community spaces in London. I’m deeply passionate about community and I feel it’s always the buzzword that I talk about a lot, but as anyone who shares in the beautiful community knows, you can become obsessed by it and it’s all you want to talk about.

E:  Absolutely! Very relatable on my part; I don’t have to explain to you, we’re surrounded by creative people, and I think that London has a special network of creatives.

A:  I also think, although costs are increasing everywhere, that it is slightly cheaper to do things here, so we have more ability to try something that might not be doable in Toronto, Montreal, or New York. For me, I feel I’ve passed a hurdle in my business—I’m established. I feel comfortable to try something new, and for me it’s this new self-assigned job: creating options for other people and creating what I want to see in the community. For me, the softer, the better.  

Soft Fest by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.


E: Absolutely, all of that! I think softness is a big deal right now because the world in many ways seems to get harder and nastier. So not only is your work creating a counter-narrative to that, but it’s also imagining a better world— I love that. Correct me if I’m wrong about that interpretation.

A: I think that’s a nice way of putting it! I don’t think in terms of what I’m doing in this specific decision—I’m making. Most of my work is inspired by either what I want to see, or a reaction to what I’m seeing. A lot of my local stuff is tongue-in-cheek; there’s a bit of hurt underneath. There’s some humor, but with my gravestone design, there’s a hurt for the city that’s lost all these treasured spaces. But there’s also a bit of confusion about it. Why does London lose everything? There are so many layers to that, but I think a lot of them can be seen as negative. I think the work has been an interesting way to put an artistic spin on not just being negative about the things that are hard, or the things that are frustrating or sad, but to try to see through it with softness.

The Lost Loves of London design. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: I absolutely love the gravestone design; I got that shirt for my partner. When he wears that shirt out in public, everybody points out that they remember this place or that place.

A: I get the same responses from people when I have the shirt at markets or events. This year I made a big version of the design featuring 163 places. It’s become this fun local history project. I’ve never thought of myself as a local historian, but I feel I am now.

E: That comes with community engagement, doesn’t it?

A: It does! They’re inextricable from each other. When you’re looking into the deaths of these important community spaces, you have a community history. You become a local historian; you’re deeply thinking about these places that used to host house parties. When I was in my twenties, my favorite thing to do was go to a house show. There was something about seeing a show in somebody’s basement that had a certain layer of specialness. You have that deep community bonding where you’re dancing, and you’re in the pit with people, sweating together, screaming together—there’s something special there. Maybe you don’t know it at the time, but when that space is gone, you yearn for it. That gravestone design was creating a space for that grief. I didn’t realize what I was making at the time. I had the idea, brainstorming with some of my friends in our print shop, and I was like “This would be such a funny zine.”  And then it just spiraled out from there. My idea came first, but then the more research I did, the more I asked people about their favorite lost spaces, the more the work became a piece of old memory, with all the feelings alongside that. It’s been an amazing connector for me in the community.

I love to make niche London merch, but, beyond that, it is about the connection aspect. It’s not just about making a T-shirt for me, it’s about the message behind it. A T-shirt can’t be just for me—it would have five places on it, and it would be only my memories. It has to be for the community as shared memories. Shared memories–that’s part of what builds a community, it brings people together. You share in the good and the bad.

E: Your style, what I’ve been seeing from you, is connected to shared spaces, community experiences, and creating work out of it. What is this process for you and what does it mean to you?

A: I think it gives me something to have purpose for. I am an artist, and it’s great that I’m making art. I think having a community lens to a lot of the work that I do, or even who I work with, is important. I am somebody who doesn’t really expand beyond London. I have a support network here that aligns with the mission around everything else I’m doing. I’m getting a mural project and then my next mural is from word of mouth because this person saw the other job that I did. It just demonstrated to me that you can have a  strong supportive community and don’t have to strive for something else. This goes back to when I was in art school at Western. There was this idea that to be an artist, you had to move to a bigger city and be represented by a gallery. That was the way to do it, constantly marketing yourself, and trying to live in that super inauthentic fine art space supporting the bourgeoisie.

I think it’s been revolutionary to make a $3 sticker, a $30 T-shirt, or a larger project mural, and have it be for people in my local community. I don’t need that pat on the back recognition, that gallery stamp of approval, or being purchased by a collector to call it art. That’s been a powerful thing for me and driven a lot of my work. I shelved that frustration of not being able to achieve that ideal when I left university, and now it’s a joy to be able to say I didn’t need to do it that way. I was able to do it my own way. I am so supported here, so it’s in turn made me feel that this is a good place to be. It is a good place to put down roots, and I’m happy to be here. I have no plans to leave.

Pamela Scharbach (L) and Alayna Hryclik (R) of Mural Baby. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: We have a unique environment here in London with a small-town feel but a lot of big-city amenities. That includes our cultural scene which has huge potential for growth. I don’t think we could see that growth if all of us were to give up, throw our hands in the air and say fuck it, I’m going to Toronto. Obviously, we talked a bit about it already, but are you able to reveal the locations of your upcoming mural projects in our city?

A: I can reveal both of my next projects! I’m very excited about them. The first, which hopefully is starting this coming week, might be an ongoing project over the fall depending on timing. My mural painting partner (Pamela Scharbach) and I painted a fun project at the Big Brothers Big Sisters location on Wharncliffe. We did this fun meandering line about the building, and it’s been one of my favorite projects. They have an amazing team, and they got a grant to upgrade their boardroom into a community room. They reached out to me again, and they want to bring us back for another mural project on the inside this time. I’m excited to work with them again—they were great people to work with. It’s nice to partner with people who are community-minded and who make such an impact in the community. We’re still in the brainstorming process but the ideas are flowing, and Pam and I are very excited about that project.

The second mural project I have coming up is for the Summit at the Western Fair. The Summit is an urban arts exploration event put on by Ken Galloway and his Risky Play with Paint Initiative project. Last year I was able to paint a peanut-harvesting wagon. This year I’m still waiting on some of the details, but I will again be painting live during the Western Fair. You have all kinds of people, including people from out of town, watching and talking to you.  I’m an introvert, but to be the spectacle, you must be kind and talk to strangers. There’s a lot of people who come over, and whatever you’re doing sparks a story in them. I’m talking to people, I’m making connections, and that’s part of the fun of it too.

Both of those projects I’m excited about, and both are for people that I worked with last year who have brought me back this year. Constantly building relationships and working together multiple times is always fun. I feel murals have this immersive experience working with this specific person in their location. It’s so nice and so fun, and then at the end of it we’ve developed some beautiful friendships.

Soft Flirt Mural from the Summit at the Western Fair, organized by Risky Play 519. Photo by Alayna Hryclik, courtesy of the artist.

E: I’m so glad we have these mural initiatives, because they bring a lot of brightness and cheer to our city during dark times, including the literal darkness of winter.

A: It’s all free, publicly accessible art, which is something I’m passionate about.

I love London but let’s not waste words. There are some serious downfalls, especially when it comes to certain City Council initiatives, and the things that get funding, and the things that don’t. At least we have public art if not other things. Living in London, I know that there are serious problems, pitfalls where we lack support for social services like SafeSpace and the work that they do. If I didn’t have a positive way through, I would be so mad at the world, and that’s not productive either. They’re trying to turn things around, and art helps us do that. I think having a platform in the community also helps me do that. Community is amazing. There are so many good things, but also, we have to put them in the context of giving support to the people who need it. Even if I can’t give someone money, because I’m still a working artist, I can share my platform with people or align my community event with something. These things give us a united front against the problems we face—like certain city counselors who antagonize social support organizations in our community.

“Everything is Fine in London Ontario…” T-shirt by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: You have experience with local exhibitions, galleries, and arts events. You did Print Pop earlier this year at Palasad, and prior to that you were at TAP Centre for Creativity. Was there anything else this year that I missed?

A:  I had a small show at Variety Cafe. They’ve become great advocates for local shows and local artists, and they’ve been incredibly supportive of me. That was a nice little diversion from my typical artwork. It was a textile collection, but it’s something that I always want to come back to. They gave me the platform to do that, and they’re supportive and encouraging. That was lovely. Then I do a lot of work with Punk Rock Flea Market (PRFM), which is a market with live music as well. PRFM has been instrumental in keeping a DIY spirit alive in our community.

E: London has this dialogue where the harder and grittier our city gets; the more punk rock people seem to get about it and the more people try to create with each other. PRFM helped a lot of small punk bands and visual artists get exposure. I can see how strongly they’ve influenced you and how you’ve influenced them.

A: We’ve been aligned from the beginning. I launched Soft Flirt at the first PRFM. At that time, they were just community members, then we became friends in the process. I did a bunch of markets over the years, and then in 2022, I weaseled my way onto the team and now we work together. It’s been a beautiful reciprocal relationship. We have a shared anniversary and a shared history, which is a fun thing to have. We [had] our September market on the 28th, and it’s the anniversary of Soft Flirt and also the anniversary of PRFM.

E: Could you tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you’ve experienced and your triumphs too?

A: There have been times when I should have had a part-time job to help support myself financially, but I was digging my heels in and making it work with Soft Flirt alone. A lot of my challenges were times when I didn’t have a lot of jobs going on, when I didn’t have markets, or when I didn’t have a lot of places where I felt I could share my art. I work well when I’m busy all the time and I have lots of stuff going on, but then the well runs dry. I get to completion and then I just allow that to spiral. I don’t necessarily always pull myself back up in a timely manner.

My hardest ruts were self-imposed, and I think that’s important to learn from and learn through. There are things that I could have done to make things easier for myself, but I was stubbornly motivated to succeed alone. I’m somebody who struggles with rejection sensitivity. I’ve applied for a lot of public calls for murals, and applied for grants, and I get my hopes up. If something doesn’t come through, I’ve had to learn from my own feelings of rejection. I think that some of those experiences are unavoidable, and some of those are inevitable. It’s the growth of being an artist. You must keep trying. You must keep applying for things. You’re not going to get everything you want, and I see that as a struggle a lot of artists go through, and a lot of people in the community go through.  

There’s a lack of funding for artists, so the opportunities are further between. That’s something that I think I’ll always be challenged by. I get really excited about opportunities, and if I don’t get it, it’s always a hard pill to swallow. There have been some seriously difficult moments, just digging myself out of periods of funk without minimizing it. I’ve recently landed on what works well for me, and it is keeping busy and working together collaboratively with people that I’m excited about working with. Challenges and successes can be one and the same, and I think that the process of being an artist is finding your process.

“For a Good Time Call Anybody Else” T-Shirt by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: It’s never easy finding the space to feel your feelings and get through it while becoming resilient and not bitter.

A: I had a bad bout of rejection this year, and it really hit me hard. I felt embarrassed by it. I had to work through those feelings which is why I took July off. I was so burnt out emotionally. I had three back-to-back months which were busy, high energy, and successful. Sometimes that pendulum sways too far in the opposite direction afterward, and I get hit with— I jokingly call it—Summer Time Sadness. It’s just burnout. If I’m not booking a mural for a couple of months, or I’m not booking a collaboration, then my spark, my fire, is a bit dim. Then it’s hard to self-start on my own ideas and projects. I work best when I keep myself busy because I have a constant level of inspiration happening. When the burnout hits, it’s hard to climb back out of that, because that’s the way that my brain works. It’s such a tough balance to learn to live with, to bounce back when you can’t even create. If I’m going to be told “no” by this thing I’m applying for, then why don’t I make my own thing? I think it can make you wallow sometimes, but the positive result of rejection is figuring out a way to make it happen yourself. It’s coming from my own pocket—that’s the reality of community projects sometimes. Funding is not so easy to attain, but the stubborn need to succeed is and it has to happen.

E: You have those projects coming up that you told me about, but, in the long term, what do you want to see for your practice? Do you want to do exhibitions, or do you want to do more festivals? What are your plans for your own art practice and for London as well?

A: Soft Fest is something that I plan to do once a year, every year until I’m done doing it. In the first two years, Soft Fest was a four-day event—something on each of those four days. That felt like the right formula, so I’m not necessarily dreaming too big. I would be happy if next year we do the same thing again. If I were to come into some community funding, I would just keep expanding. I would feel very accomplished if I kept it running for even five years.

On a personal level, I always love to try new things. I’m keeping it under wraps for now, but there’s a different art medium that I’m going to learn next year. I’m excited to open myself up to some new skills and it will expand my art practice. This sounds so sneaky, but it’s because it’s a secret until January.  I’ve always wanted to learn new artistic skills. When I started, I was sewing and screen printing. Now I’m screen printing, mural painting, designing, illustrating, and community planning. There are so many other layers to what I’m doing, and I want to be a jack-of-all-trades. I want to say “challenge accepted” to different directions and paths. Within Soft Flirt, I don’t know what my goals are necessarily, because I maybe don’t know about the opportunity yet. There are endless ways that I want to expand my art-making and develop new skills, but also hone the skills that I already have. I want to paint more murals, I want to screen more T-shirts, but I also want to learn new things and try new events.

I would love to do more work with galleries. It was just cool to work with TAP Centre for Creativity this year. I could see some Soft Flirt gallery shows in the future. The possibilities are endless. Maybe something huge will change and suddenly we’ll get loads of arts funding. Everything is up in the air right now. Everything is chaotic, but that means good things as well as bad things could happen. I am such a hopeful, optimistic person who has been beaten down over the last four years. I miss being delusionally optimistic all the time— it keeps your spirits high. You can’t just focus on all the bad. The bad is happening and we have to recognize it, but it doesn’t really do us any favors if we can’t be hopeful for a different reality. Otherwise, you are just going to wallow and, while there’s good art made in wallowing, there’s also good art made in hope. All the feelings are valid, but I think there’s more positive progress with the hopeful.

 I think it’s powerful to embrace softness—it’s the solution to things that are harder.

E: Circling back around to softness and how softness plays a huge role in your work–what does vulnerability mean to you as a radical act?

A: I’ve been a plus-sized person and see the plus-size body through a lens of softness. I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with my own identity, and my own image in the world, and I feel I’ve developed some beautiful things out of protecting myself. It’s taken me a long time to come to a place where I’ve been able to embrace my literal softness, and alongside that, I formed some beautiful friendships. I’ve been all about platonic love and platonic romance in my life, and I think that it was something that I had to learn through that lens. To be able to put that into my art and to create what I’ve created now, I’ve deprioritized traditional romantic relationships in my life in favor of nurturing beautiful platonic relationships—creating community before I knew that that’s what I was doing. Having these friendships in predominantly female spaces and queer spaces was everything. Societal expectations about pursuing a partner are shoved down our throats in general, and that’s just sort of what you’re supposed to do.


E: You lose something when you sink all your spirit and your heart into one single romantic relationship. You’re missing out on all those nuanced connections.

A: There’s just layers to it. I must honor that part of what makes me soft. It comes from unlearning internalized fatphobia and the trauma that went alongside that, and feeling grateful for what my body can do for me now. There’s a softness to that that I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to specifically, but that’s part of the core of what I’m doing. Then there’s this lens of platonic love. The harsh reality is that we’re always faced with the hardness of the world. We all have this inner softness, and why not make it more of a priority? Why not make it the focus of what you’re doing? It’s a literal thing, but it’s also a theoretical softness and being tender with yourself, your community, with your loved ones.

I try to infuse that message in my art. I have some designs that don’t necessarily feel that soft, but it’s all about what I want for myself and for my community. It is a gentle place to live. I think some people get hung up on visuals; they think soft means pink and floral. I have a lot of those aspects in my work and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s beautiful to explore the ways that softness can be an ideology and energy in pursuit of something more tender in the world, however you want to define that. I think that there are so many avenues to pursue softness in the abstract. Soft Flirt allows me to do this on a grander scale, and  highlight platonic relationships. I think that’s my new mission in life: to remind people that to have stronger romantic relationships you need to have the support of platonic relationships. I think it’s powerful to embrace softness—it’s the solution to things that are harder.

E: It’s also a revolutionary idea. We’re told from an early age not to be soft. We live in a heteropatriarchy that treats empathy as weakness. Kids grow up hearing messaging like “Stop crying or give I’ll you something to cry about.” We need to create a revolutionary space where it’s okay to feel these things together, where it’s okay to experience grief, softness, and tenderness. How else are we going to process these sentiments in our community unless we process them together?

A:  In my early days of Soft Flirt, before it became a business, it was a nickname. In the early days, it was my Tumblr identity. It must have been 2014-2015 that I stumbled on a piece by Lora Mathis about radical softness as a weapon. It was a while ago, but this idea that softness is the change, and softness is the medium has really stuck with me. Not everyone is going to get what this is all about, but the people who do are worth my time, my art, and my energy. That’s who I want to make things for.

I don’t always have the exact formula for the exact thing that’s expected, but nobody does. That’s not what’s being asked; what’s being asked is that we contribute positively and proactively and that we uplift and support our community.

To check out more of Alayna’s work through Soft Flirt, visit her Instagram @softflirt or her website.

Surveillance Eyes: In Conversation with Harley Morman

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT.

Don’t Dream It, Be It

Harley Morman

Southern Alberta Art Gallery

May 11 – June 22, 2024  

Interview by Migueltzinta Solís

There’s something about Harley Morman’s work that makes you want to sink your teeth into it. I’ve been close friends with Harley for seven years – in the good times and the bad – and I always look forward to being transported to the colorful, gummy world that is his trans, queer creative practice. We are at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) during Lethbridge Pride, a few hours after riding together in the parade as part of our local queerdo bicycle club. After what I felt were too many cheering children, it feels good to bask in the simmering glow of plastic, rubber, and knitted objects that comprise Harley Morman’s solo exhibition, Don’t Dream It, Be It.

The exhibition space, once a library, is transformed by an overlay of trans-metaphysical subliminality. Coloured tape crisscrosses the hardwood floor, mirrors hang from above on bright plastic chains, nearly life-size Perler bead self-portraits stand sentinel, and lenticular images wiggle and wink as you move through the room. A knitted rope sways from the ceiling, delightful yet foreboding, ending in a sprinkling of rainbow aquarium gravel. A full wall is dedicated to an enigmatic map made from strips of tape which, upon scrutiny, reveals itself to be a play diagram for the exhibition space. At the end of the room, behind the hanging mirrors, a scoreboard with a clock, and a rainbow collage of plastic figurines surveil the visitor. Inhabiting the space, one may feel that a game is in play, and one, in their queerness, might feel a looming sense of anxiety about what the game is, what the rules are, and whether they are getting it “right” or not.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

Migueltzinta Solís (MS): Hi, Harley. (laughs)

Harley Morman (HM): Hi, Miguel. (giggles)

MS: My first question is, who are the different Harleys in this show?

HM: There are a lot of different Harleys here. There’s the Harley that is me, that’s my body…

MS: That I’m talking to.

HM: Yes! That is speaking. There’s also a ton of different Harleys. The most literal Harley is the work that is called Megan number 3: Harley. It makes good narrative sense to say it was the last thing I finished for the exhibition. There are three Perler bead works in this show. Each one represents me at a different stage of my transition, which wasn’t the plan at first.

When I made the first Megan, the one that looks like it’s diving for a clock, it’s trying to catch something. That Megan was made during my MFA, for a specific project that was essentially me bouncing around the volleyball or balloon-like heads of teachers who I had worked with during my MFA. I had worked with Perler beads before, and at the time when I made that Megan, in 2016, it represented a new direction in terms of the size and complexity of the pieces in terms of the way I was using and interpreting colour information. I wanted to make more of them.

The second one is from 2019. That was made specifically for the Dunlop Art Gallery in an exhibition of queer art on the prairies. Each one that I make of these gets bigger and more complicated in terms of the pattern. The third one took a long time, much longer than they normally do, even though I’ve gotten quick at it. Although I’m slower than I might have been before 2017 just because of the plaid jacket I’m wearing in the work.

MS: I like this idea of increasing complexity over multiple iterations or replications of Harley. First, I relate to the complexity of embodiment across these different replications of self. In simpler language you could say, “the complexity of gender,” but because of the temporal and kinetic questions here, it’s more than just about gender, which is why I love this work. I’m curious to hear you say more about the kinetic movements or actions that the figures are doing.

HM: Each of the figures represents an evolution of complexity of how I’m working with material. But in terms of the gestures that each of the figures is doing: each one plays off the others but could be understood as – I don’t want to use the word “evolution” – but is a direct response to the others. In the first one, I’m in a diving action pose because originally, I wanted to make it look like I was attempting to catch the heads that were coming at me, that were bouncing all over the place. They were up high and coming at the viewer and at the “me” that was on the wall. I wanted to make it look like that figure was an approximate life-size figure actively interacting with things. But if you look at my pose, the diving pose, it’s very much a responsive pose. I have my hands together, clasped with my wrists flattened, in the way that I [was] taught that you’re supposed to hit a volleyball. I never really knew how to hit a volleyball. It’s watching: that figure is looking up towards stuff but is very much in a ready pose but not in a “go” pose yet.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

In the second one, where my hands are up, I was imagining something akin to a volleyball serve– there’s no reason that I’m using volleyball as a metaphor here aside from the fact that it was a sport that as a girl in the Midwest, I was often called upon to do in gym class. It was also a thing that because of my vision problems, I am hopeless at it and always have been. I’m just incapable of seeing things that come at me fast. Anyway, I was thinking of the jumping up action and reaching for something, so it looks a little bit more active. And here in this exhibition, it’s reaching up towards an alarm clock that’s sitting at the top of the wall.

In this third one, I wasn’t sure if it would quite “go” because it’s not an indoor sport: I’m riding a bicycle. The bicycle is rendered photographically except for the outline of the bike, which is in flat colors that are similar colors to the wall. And it’s away from the others. The other two on either side of the scoreboard are a symmetrical set. But this is something else, it’s away and it’s very much watching what’s happening.

MS: I love this hypothetical engagement with sport. (laughs)

HM: It is very much just an imaginary sport. The lines on the floor seem to be fooling people, and that’s what they’re supposed to do, but they’re not based on any sort of official diagram. I’m looking at the scoreboard with the mirrors, and there is a “basketball key,” a word that I only knew when I said that I wanted to make one. I think sport and activity in this show is not a literal reference to actual practices, it’s more a field on which actors play.

MS: As a gay villain, I, of course, love the language of “fooling people.” I love the queer permission you’ve given yourself to define the space into an imaginary sports field.

HM: Most of the time, a lot of the references really core to this show are not visible. And I don’t expect them to be and it’s not necessary. I wanted it to look like a gym. When I was in elementary school, the only reason I would participate in sports activities was when I was forced to. I was always sitting to the side and crafting. No matter where we were, whether we were indoors or outdoors, I was always finger knitting.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

MS: Is that what this is over here?

HM: Yeah. Kind of. It’s not literally the finger knitting that I made long ago. So, the finger knitting, you’re using your fingers as the pegs or needles so there’s only four of them. It ends up making super thin and loose rope that doesn’t have a really good use.

MS: In looking at this long rope of finger knitting that attaches to the ceiling with a carabiner and ends on the floor in a pool of…is that aquarium gravel?

HM: It’s aquarium gravel, some plastic gems, and a few beads. I wanted something to be on the ground. I wanted for this knit object to look at least as threatening as the original object felt to me. The aquarium gravel is there as an uncomfortable fall, instead of there being a cushy mat underneath. If you attempted to climb this, you’d fall onto an uncomfortable surface that would be super jabby.

MS: That would probably stick to your skin and leave those little indents.

HM: [The gravel] is its own security since it makes so much noise if you step on it. You can hear it, easily, outside of the gallery.

MS: I saw the diagram of the space on the wall, and the thing that made me realize that it was a diagram of the space – a bird’s eye view of the space – was the gravel there.

HM: The diagram is so provisional and messy looking; I don’t expect people to necessarily know what it’s supposed to be. Because my work tends to be so intricately thought out and polished, the way that this drawing came together was kind of uncomfortable. It’s weird to say that fully intuitive making can be uncomfortable, but it is. When I saw the court lines on the floor, they gave me permission to have the drawing on the wall be as wacky as I wanted it to be. I used a level to make the blue and pink lines on the background, but everything else was done by eye. When I look at it, in one sense it’s kind of a picture of how I’m dizzy, because it’s not straight or even kind of straight in a typical way. The whole thing is a bit rotated in exactly the way things are spinning for me all the time.   

…The drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”   

         

MS: I feel like this is a map of how you move as well. I can visualize you moving in this set of blue lines much more easily than I can imagine myself. It represents you offering your own perspective and experience of a space and how you move through it.

HM: I love that. The lines did have a logic when I was making them. I forget what that was, and I don’t think it’s important. The important thing was some of them were meant to represent actual physical trajectories and others, sidelines, looking back and forth.

MS: You described this piece as important as well as uncomfortable.

HM: That is important, oh my gosh. I mean the drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”

MS: I feel like there’s something in here about the difference between the hypothetical and embodied experience, and how it relates to understanding “the rules of the world.”

HM: A lot of my past work has been concerned with the rules and conventions of gallery spaces and institutional spaces. I think part of what I have a hard time articulating is just the fact these are good visual metaphors for the difference between the smooth and the striated.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

The Scoreboard is one of the things that I have shown before. It was in the iteration of the show that was at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). When it was at the AGA, it was much more prominent because of the lighting, and the color of the walls, and the way the space was set up in general. It was essentially the focus of the entire room and it’s not necessarily that prominent here. It reads not as the most important thing that you see upon entering but just as one of many. The Scoreboard was made to only be legible when you stand inside the arc of the mirrors. If you look in a mirror, you could see not only yourself but also the scoreboard and things reflected the right way round. The clock is running the right way in the reflection, you can read the mirrored letters that are on The Scoreboard.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

I love when people take selfies in the reflection, so that things are the right way around. Because generally The Scoreboard is incredibly ambiguous – it is not, and I don’t want it to be, apparent what it’s tracking. I think of it actively, and I know it doesn’t necessarily read like this directly because on one level it is very colorful and full of glittery beads and it’s shiny. But I think of it as a threatening piece, in the same way I think of gross, dirty climbing things as also being very threatening just by their existence. It’s just the idea that you might be tracked or that something about your interaction will be seen and could be accounted for.

MS: It’s a looming metric.

HM: Yeah, exactly! I mean in terms of transness, which was obviously a huge thing when I was making it back in 2021, it’s like competition as a bodily metaphor, but also a representation of tracking in terms of the timelines of change, of transition, and of growth and change in general.

MS: I think we both know that within trans experience and trans societies, there is a weird competitiveness. Whose transition is the best, who’s doing it right.

HM: It’s one of the things everyone knows, and nobody likes, but also you end up participating in it. I often find myself, or parts of my brain, echoing this hypercompetitive [sense]…I don’t think I necessarily have good things to say about that. It’s like tracking bad behaviour, bad feelings in general. This is very different from the affect that I think this show has for most people. I want it to, when you really think about it or look at it in the right way, look not happy but kind of threatening and scary.

MS: I definitely see it as sinister. A lot of people are like, “It’s playful”, “It’s a game”, “It’s a fun thing,” and “Kids will love it.”

HM: Yeah, and it is, and kids do absolutely love it. And I love that they love it, but also that’s only one reading of it and it’s not the most interesting reading of it.

MS: I think it’s interesting in the context of recent trans history, how we are from the late 90s, early 2000s, certainly in terms of FTMs and trans men, which is language that isn’t even cool anymore. We had Buck Angel and Chaz Bono and there were these metrics of passing and who had the most masculinization result. And then, of course, more recently there has been a shift away from that but now we have metrics of who has the better politics. It’s like whose is the best gender.

HM: But the gender isn’t necessarily based on hairiness. The gender is like a different, less physical aesthetic, but a politicized aesthetic.

MS: Hypothetical gender. Who has the most evolved gender and self-contextualization.

HM: Oh my god.

MS: Like the metric is different but there’s still a metric, but what even is it?

HM: In a way a person could think of it as being worse because it’s wider, and there are so many more expectations because transition is very much hypervisible at the moment, and because it’s so visible, the one who is undergoing transition is accountable to an even wider group of people.

As I’m standing over here, through the arc of the mirrors I’m looking at the lenticulars over there and thinking about how the stripes look like bars in a way. Some of them, not all of them.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

MS: Because my work has been about trans self-imaging, I’m curious about the way the mirror’s been working in here and the way time is part of that. Because there doesn’t seem to be mirrors without clocks in here.

HM: I like the mirrors with the references to time because of how it implicates a person and their body at a specific moment. It’s hard to not realize that you’re a viewer, which I insist on hitting people over the head with. I think there are considerably less mirrors in this show than there are in most of my shows. What are they reflecting? It’s kind of like going back in time, in a way. I feel like it’s important to have mirrors with the lenticular stuff because they do a weird thing with simultaneity and travel.

I’ve heard from some trans people who come into the show and see the lenticulars, that they make them feel weirded out and uncomfortable. Because I started transitioning so late and had already been practicing for years, it was not even a thought that I could or might want to be secretive about it. It seems like the obvious thing to do for me at this point in my life and career, to be completely fine with having my old photos interlaced.

MS: Transness has different generations that are not necessarily attached to chronological time. How I feel you and I are of a similar trans generation even though you started your transition later in life than I did, and our transitions happened within distinct decades of trans history and discourse. And it’s very different than the other generations that are simultaneously unfolding.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

HM: Yeah, that makes sense in terms of me because you’re always teasing me by saying how my gender is very anachronistic like my gender is a time period. I’m kind of curious about how my students might interpret the lenticulars. I hope that at least some of them might think that this was naughty. (laughs) Like it was somehow transgressive to show them blending into each other instead of a binary on/off situation.

MS: I certainly find these works to be very transgressive. As a completely immersive space, I sense the question, “Am I doing it right?”, on a societal level. “Is this how it’s done?”

HM: Yes, that exact thing. That nebulous sense of anxiety about “Am I being watched?” and “Is this okay?” is really important.

MS: “Is this how you play the game?” “Am I winning?” “Is this scoring?”

HM: (laughs) Yeah. The fact that it’s in a gallery, in an art space considered in relation to not trans but art communities, which are their own kind of weird hyper-competitiveness.

MS: To go back to lenticulars, and unease, I would say that in their layered-ness, discomfort, and unsettling-ness, they express the embodied experience, that is both uncomfortable and really rich, of being a person stretched across different points of time, mapped through gender pinpoints, kind of like that map over there.

HM: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that kind of temporal experience of aging and of thinking about yourself…because I think, or hope, everyone would probably think or feel this like they’ve been several different people since they were that age. In the past 25 years, I’ve been a bunch of different people. Some are probably a lot more important than technically whichever gender I might be perceived as. I feel like aside from transness, the depiction of aging might be relatable more generally.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

This little best girl and best boy (referring to stickers on the gallery wall display) is one of my favorite things in the show. It’s just one of the scholastic stickers and both exist as separate stickers and all I did was just put them together and they worked perfectly. I feel like the scholastic stickers in general are rich in terms of references and material and lend themselves to turning into lenticulars. This cluster wall doesn’t get a lot of attention, but one of things that I like is the big clock. This wall – the eyes that are at the important points, the twelve, the three and the six, etc, are all eyes from stickers. This wall has just a bunch of other references to surveillance and stuff.

MS: Metrics of performance and surveillance. Can we just touch on that? (Referring to the front page of a notebook with handwriting displayed on wall.)

HS: Yeah, that’s an actual page from a notebook because I said I’m a keeper, I do have all the paperwork I’ve produced throughout school and after that because I keep everything. I feel really justified in it because it’s coming in handy, repeatedly.    

MS: Given that the paper refers to Megan’s rules, have you been following Megan’s rules?

HM: I can’t remember what Megan’s rules are. “This is a notebook, my notebook. Don’t bother it or you’ll have to answer to me.” I think that I’ve totally virtually destroyed Megan’s notebook by removing the cover.

MS: “P.S. Have fun”, is that what it says at the bottom?

HM: I think it probably does.

MS: Was there more you wanted to say about this wall?

HM: No, I just wanted to say, “Surveillance eyes!” (Points at lenticulars of eyes.) I just wanted to point them out.

MS: Transness continues to be so surveilled in terms of policy, particularly in Albertan trans and queer school and health policy right now. I think this show expresses the metaphysical experience of that kind of surveillance that is part of trans experience.

HM: Like what are the psychic implications of surveillance that trans people put themselves under before transitioning, or just in general, because of gender feelings.

MS: Yeah totally, think about in medical transition when you go on hormones, you have to do the experimental dose and you self-surveil as part of that. There’s an expectation to self-surveil.

HM: Yeah, it’s a requirement.

For more of Harley’s dizzy delights, follow him on IG: @Harley_Morman.
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