Avatar: The Last Bimbo’s Bender

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

by Matt Morris

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

–Ashnikko in a 2021 interview with Forbes

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashnikko. Credit: Vasso Vu, Warner Records.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Sunday Films at the London Lesbian Film Festival 2026


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

By Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

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

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

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

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


Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

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

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

Photos by Dana Nosella Photography for LLFF.

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

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

I Feel That Way Too, Too

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

i feel that way too
jaz papadopoulos
Nightwood Editions, 2024


Reviewed by Erin Kirsh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your confessions…
reluctance
eagerness
embarrassment

can and will
be used
against you.”[4]


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salient Softness: To our reunited future by Rihab Essayh

Rihab Essayh

Curated by Megan Kammerer

Visual Arts Centre of Clarington

February 8, 2025 – May 4, 2025

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

By Rashana Youtzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years

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

The Bass Museum of Art

2100 Collins Avenue

Miami Beach, FL 33139

Sep 25, 2024 – Aug 17, 2025

By Yvonne Owens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between the Senses and Horizons

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

By Jabeen Qadri

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

Dec 24. 5.45 pm. Shalimar Town, Lahore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bushes take me somewhere

They itch, they scratch the edges

Blood rushes, drip by drip

A voice calls me towards it

I’m scared to go, to look in the eyes

This could be home

References

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

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

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

By Samuel Schwindt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feminism, Grief, and Politics: The Mosquito is Dead by Hannah Höch 

Hannah Höch. The Mosquito is Dead. 1922. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photography by Robert LaPrelle, Kimbell Art Museum.

By Alexandra Hulsey 

Did you know that all mosquitoes that bite are female? It feels unfair. Something so annoying, invasive, and evil… shouldn’t be a woman. We wouldn’t bite, rage, and feed off blood like that—unless we had a reason. But even then, well-earned. 

Hannah Höch painted The Mosquito is Dead in 1922, right in the murky middle between World War I and World War II. It’s a strange, uncanny painting—surreal, uncomfortable, poking at something it never fully names. Höch made it after her breakup with Raoul Hausmann, a fellow Dadaist and, frankly, a classic early-20th-century art-world misogynist. So naturally, people interpret the work as a breakup painting. 

Is the mosquito him? A bloodsucking, lingering nuisance finally dealt with? Or is it her? 

Here’s why I question it: the mosquito isn’t squashed. It’s not a splatter on a wall, not a curled-up carcass stuck to someone’s ankle. It’s laid out, stomach-down, all legs intact, splayed gently like a pinned specimen or a creature that simply… stopped. In real life, mosquitoes often don’t die of natural causes. We end them. They get slapped, swatted, smeared. So, how did this one die? Did it starve? Fall from the air? Give up? 

While I’ve never been a mosquito’s first choice, I’ve still been bitten by them in my past. I know what it’s like to be drained, to carry the echoes of something that ended badly. The Mosquito is Dead feels like a soft allude to that: something dead but not resolved. A kind of quiet violence. A grief that hums instead of screams. Not unlike the undercurrent of the rise of fascism and, in turn, the Second World War. 

To the left of the mosquito sits an hourglass—but it’s doing something bizarre. Sand fills the top half, while the bottom curves into a downward concave shape. There, Höch suggests a faint sense of movement with a delicate, wispy brushstroke. Gravity has gone off-script. The sand clings to the sides like glue, dripping with eerie slowness. It makes me think of how time feels after trauma: suspended, disobedient, looping. Höch’s hourglass doesn’t measure time—it resists it. It longs to undo something. To rewind.

At the center stands a small, jointed figure. It resembles a drawing mannequin, but the longer you look, the less certain that becomes. It’s standing stiffly on a pedestal atop a circular base, its limbs angular and awkward: one leg steps forward, its torso twists to face us, and its head tilts at a sharp angle. One arm is bent behind its back; the other might be raised or abstracted entirely. It’s as if the body is trying to perform something expected of it, but doesn’t quite know how. Maybe the mannequin is a stand-in for how women are expected to perform, contort, and behave under pressure. Stiff but delicate. Controlled. 

The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world.

To the right of the mannequin, a bare tree juts up, its few branches impaling three large leaves. To the left, a thin black flag hangs on a tall pole. The tree doesn’t offer shelter or growth—it feels surgical and barren. The black flag isn’t waving. It’s more of a quiet signal of grief, or warning, or resignation. 

This is where Höch’s genius hits hardest. The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world. The personal and the political fold into one another. The painting doesn’t solely depict ‘loss’, it distorts the very tools we use to measure and explain it. Time, posture, symbols—all slightly off. 

Höch’s mosquito might be more than just a bug: Maybe it’s her ex, maybe it’s the patriarchy, maybe it’s history itself. All I know is she lets it die its own death. She leaves it whole. And that feels important. 

Höch was later included in the Nazis’ 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, where her work was mocked as immoral, un-German, and dangerous. And yet—she kept making it. She kept pointing out how gender, war, and nationalism are tangled in the same systems of control. Her art was never safe. It was never meant to be. 

The Mosquito is Dead doesn’t yell. It murmurs. It lingers. It’s grief that won’t resolve, wounds that refuse to close. It’s about endings that don’t truly end. And that rings timely and true now. 

The Mosquito is Dead is currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910–1945, an exhibition that traces how German artists responded to one of the most volatile eras in modern history. The show runs through June 22, 2025.

Messy Babies and Mother-Monsters: Liz McCarthy’s Post-Natal Overload

Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.

by Matt Morris

“I want more happy children in our country and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

–Vice President JD Vance,
            National March for Life Rally,
          Washington DC, 24 January 2025

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?”
                                                                        –Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons

Liz McCarthy

THE EXPECTANCIES

Roman Susan Art Foundation

February 8, 2025 – March 1, 2025

Babies are messy—literally and symbolically. Conceptualizing infancy—not to mention reckoning with the material realities of reproduction, birth, and the various interdependencies denoted by the newborn body—is to attract a morass of projections and urgencies. These stem from intersecting or opposing frameworks for selfhood, society, power relations, affect, mortality, sentimentality, crime, and whatever other facile means with which the experiment of civilization attempts to apprehend the facts and meaning of life and death per se. Treacherous as these territories may be, Liz McCarthy’s recent exhibition THE EXPECTANCIES on view at Chicago’s Roman Susan Art Foundation delivers this collision of symbolic orders to the fore. The artist has installed an uneasy nursery populated by ceramic infants onto which all sorts of charged collected objects have been adhered, watched over by a group of impassive masks assembled from shards of bricks and solder. The sculptures are also functional, operating not only as vessels to hold and carry sign chains of identities materialized but also through an array of holes across the figures, they operate as musical instruments—whistles that McCarthy encourages audiences to activate and play.

In their approach to these forms and their referents, McCarthy excites the perversity of our societal tendency to overload such evidently helpless and vulnerable newborns with an excess of associations and so many pressures to represent/perform/identify. A non-exhaustive annotation in no particular order of babies vis-à-vis today: capacities for reproduction as biological determinism; miscarriages; access and rights to abortion; genders assigned at birth and subsequent debates around gender-affirming care for minors; parenting; the stigmas and systemic attacks lavished upon single parents, especially Black and Brown mothers; Down Syndrome, spina bifida, anencephaly; fort–da, Melanie Klein’s ‘good mother;’ D.W. Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother;’ filicides from Medea to Casey Anthony; ages of consent; puberty, Bat Mitzvahs, Bar Mitzvahs, quinceaneras, Peter Pan complexes, YA coming-of-age novels, psycho-sexual coming-of-age cinema; adult baby fetishes; Pizzagate conspiracy theories; and the bizarre spate of late nineteenth century deaths of infants and nannies that was eventually attributed to poisonous arsenic used in the fashionable green colored wallpapers of the period. Reconciling even this limited account of disorderly associations is a nightmare of free-floating signification; I am so self-conscious about what the points I do and don’t include here say about me as a childless cat queer. I don’t think Audre Lorde meant it this way, but after the fact of her claim that “We can learn to mother ourselves,” it now means that offspring or not we can all be bad parents.

Liz McCarthy. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025. found infant superhero costumes and artist’s infant memento clothing on glazed porcelain with epoxy putty.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


McCarthy shares in the press materials that they were pregnant at the time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and becoming a parent within that political landscape served as context for the impulse to build babies that are literally instrumentalized. The scrutiny and play with which they have approached babies as cultural signs serves as a basis for proposing queer/ed notions of selfhood as assemblages and always fragmentary. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025, dresses a porcelain-and-epoxy putty figure in deconstructed elements of superhero costumes made for babies; the nearby Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025, is dressed in pink and white lace ruffles extracted from clothing the artist wore as a baby. These and other little bodies are displayed on lilac stands in a maternity-ward-cum-baby-store-showroom that offers whimsical and monstrous form to an ethical inquiry that perambulates around babies as signs within intricate political, psychological, erogenous, intergenerational, and materialist systems, while also inscribing a vocabulary of objects with tender reflections of the first years of parenthood. 


Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Even reified into concrete sculptural form, patina, presentation, and use within McCarthy’s prone populace emphasize the always already and ongoing instability of even parent and child and family unit as roles. Scholar John D’Emilio has marked out a concise history of compulsory heterosexual reproduction and family unit as the primary means of production in the early US colonies: “The white colonists in seventeenth-century New England established villages structured around a household economy, composed of family units that were basically self-sufficient, independent, and patriarchal…Men and women needed the labor of children. Producing offspring was as necessary for survival as producing grain. Sex was harnessed to procreation.”[1] Thereafter, a confluence of economics, affect, manufacturing, and social progress sets in parallel the advances of capitalism and the social possibility of lives—homosexual or other others—divested from het norms, “Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unity, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity—an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction.”[2]

Liz McCarthy. Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025. Artist’s infant memento clothing and epoxy putty on glazed stoneware, detail view.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


It’s worth remembering that some of the most deeply held convictions about what babies and families are categorically have emerged only recently in the wake of modernity and industrialization. It is crucial then to understand that McCarthy here shows babies as constructs, upsetting a singular, efficient psychoanalysis of subject-object relations with figurative sculptures laden not only with the exchange values assigned to art within cultural economies, but also dimensions of use value in puncturing the ceramic infants’ genitals, nipples, and fists into mouthpieces for whistle play. What comes to mind for me are the contested relationships between persons, places, and things inflamed by what Peter-Paul Verbeek calls the ‘moralizing technologies’ of the ultrasound and other key medical practices during pregnancy and birth: “All of these technological mediations generate a new ontological status for the fetus. Ultrasound imaging constitutes the fetus as an individual person; it is made present as a separate living being rather than forming a unity with its mother, in whose body it is growing.”[3]

Liz McCarthy. Memory Worn Whistle. Various memento objects from the artist’s childhood collections and epoxy
putty on glazed community studio reclaim stoneware. 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Often all the paternalistic presumptuousness, cultural debates, headlines, and orienting devices does reinforce perceived conditions of isolation. Yet this overlooks a priori interdependencies of all life outright that is so deftly evidenced by a life growing inside of a life to which it is intimately connected. Needing is one of the only conditions of the space between birth and death about which I feel certain, and it’s also so scary so much of the time. The babies McCarthy presents are inflected with all the pathos and vulnerability involved in need—in the flailing limbs, exposed intimacies, and collaged materials from a life of ID cards, hair clippings, childhood toys, crafts, costumes, and heirlooms, the artist lays totally bare the dangerous feeling too-muchness into which we are all born, and capacities for compassion and empathy for which that condition begs.

Analyst, artist, and my go-to thinker for the most sensitive and elaborate deconstructions of the maternal, Bracha L. Ettinger, maps the trauma and treacheries of needing, the risks of too little and too much, “Anxiety of abandonment and devouring [by the Ready-made mother-monster] digests and elaborates anxieties of being invaded, dominated and penetrated.”[4] Ettinger characterizes the ‘mother-monster’ as a phantasmatic scapegoat caretaker blamed for the sheer overwhelm of a world defined by ecological meltdown and governed by madness. McCarthy edges this tension to the precipice in the moments between picking up the baby whistle sculptures, ‘playing’ them by placing mouth to nubby mound genitalia and blowing, then putting these doll-like effigies down and walking away.

The meaning-full sculpted babies on display are complemented with several more elusive, abstract, and haunting Face Façade pieces: masks floated across walls and above doorways, composed from silver solder and broken pieces of Chicago common brick—a rough, gritty building material made from clay dredged from the city’s river that came into use following the Chicago Fires of the 1870s and were produced consistently until the early 1980s. In a body of work full of varied mementos and cultural artifacts, this brick perhaps most profoundly evokes the ways meaning and determination are inherited from the histories and other power structures that precede us. In the logic of these works, the self is never singular or independent, never the neoliberal ideal of an alienated unit of capital; rather, babies or subsequent adults who try to mask and repress their own unresolved infantile impulses are characterized most of all as unmanageable excess, both held and made to hold, performative, fantastical, and fragile in the face of immense, compounded forces that would seek to define. Contending with what artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen describes as “that real feeling of containing and carrying somebody, of the whole oceanic interiority that entails,”[5] Liz McCarthy fosters a zone of objects and actions with which to comprehend what has been done and what is undone in the radical simultaneous operations of giving birth and being born.

[1] John D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print, pp. 469.

[2] D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” P. 470.

[3] Peter-Paul Verbeek. Moralizing Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print, p. 24.

[4] Bracha L. Ettinger. “(M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made mother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting.” Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1), 2010. P. 18.

[5] Lise Haller Baggesen. “Mother of Pearl.” Mothernism. Chicago: Green Lantern Press, 2014. Print, p. 131.

Eternal Transcendent and Some kind of we

Robert Flack, Robert Flack: Eternal Transcendent, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Art Gallery of Guelph

Curated by Dallas Fellini

Robert Flack, B.G-Osborne [Oz], Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross,

Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, and Daze Jefferies

By Mattea Schouten

Robert Flack emerged in the Toronto art scene in the early 1980s. His depictions of the human form grew increasingly mystical as the decade unfolded, gradually introducing acid colours and psychedelic patterns into his artistic process. Flack began depicting the image of a figure superimposed over flat tie-dye backdrops and floating through space, a development that marked the beginning of his interest in the metaphysical. Flack learned he was HIV-positive in 1988, a diagnosis that profoundly influenced his work in the years that followed. Between then and his death in 1993, Flack delved into spirituality as a means of imagining transcendence beyond his physical self and the systems that failed to provide the care he needed. Empowerment is Flack’s final body of work, a collection of photomontages that reflect the artist’s developing awareness of his mortality and his desire for something beyond the physical realm. Shown alongside an exhibition dedicated to films by transgender artists from two generations, Flack’s work communicates a broader narrative of queer inheritance, particularly in relation to the lasting influence of those lost to the AIDS epidemic.

As part of the Art Gallery of Guelph’s visible storage initiative, Flack’s series has been presented alongside four of the artist’s cibachrome prints in the Eternal Transcendent exhibition. The Empowerment series, which makes up a majority of the exhibition, is constructed of seven photographs. The images form a spiritual map of the human body, superimposing hand-drawn designs over photos of the seven energy centers along the spine. Flack’s cibachrome prints depict circular labyrinths overlaid on barely discernible micrographs, the visual contents obscured by Flack’s use of a highly magnified lens. Flack’s chakra portraits are presented in order from left to right and his cibachrome works are arranged around the series along a narrow hallway connecting the collection to its sister exhibition, Some kind of we.

Robert Flack, Ascent (Chakras), 1990-1991, colour, 103.5 cm x 79.4 cm. Purchased with assistance from the Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation and an anonymous donation, 1992. Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Ascent (1990-91) is the first image from the series and displays the first chakra, representing safety and stability. Its location at the base of the spine is depicted in Flack’s photograph of a man’s backside. The photo is coloured in a rich purple and decorated with a multicoloured spiral design composed of dollar-store jewels. This image simultaneously speaks to Flack’s interest in spirituality, and to the gay community surrounding him. His undeniably queer representation of beauty and power in Ascent came at a time when public perception of gay men was still heavily stigmatized as a result of the AIDS crisis. Today, Ascent can be remembered as a bold and shameless response to the heteronormative culture which had denied Flack both safety and stability during the epidemic. Crown (1990-91) is the final piece from the Empowerment series. The image represents the seventh chakra, dedicated to spiritual transformation and a connection to the divine. Flack’s photomontage combines an image of the top of a man’s head, dark against a deep blue background, and a circular floral design hovering above it. Though this work is more ambiguous than others in the series, Crown is distinctly queer in its gender-bending combination of cropped hair, navy blue colouration and floral decoration. Crown is the closing statement of the series, encapsulating Flack’s interest in themes of enlightenment, divinity, and queer self-expression in a singular photo.

B.G-Osborne [Oz], Daze Jefferies, Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, Some kind of we, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Down the hall, Some kind of we presents video works by transgender artists, creating a soundscape that leaks into the hallway and adds an audio component to the viewing experience of Eternal Transcendent. The physical proximity between the two exhibitions makes it impossible to experience one without experiencing the other. Gendertroublemakers (1993), a short film by trans artists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, is projected onto a wall and brings forward candid conversations between the women about their sexual experiences with gay and straight cisgender men, as well as with other trans women. Cut between intimate clips of the women kissing in bed, they interview each other and describe the ways in which their sex lives and personal lives have transformed as their identities evolved.

polished (2016) is a two-channel video by contemporary artists B.G-Osborne [Oz] and Benjamin Da Silva in which they discuss trans-for-trans relationship dynamics, mental health struggles, and substance abuse. They offer nuanced perspectives on transitioning while they sit in a bath together, drinking wine and shaving their faces. The couple’s conversations and the video formatting of polished echoes that of Ross and MacKay’s Gendertroublemakers. Some kind of we offers a space for dialogue between a queer past and a queer present, visually demonstrating the inheritance of queer ideas and art forms within the community.

B.G-Osborne [Oz], Daze Jefferies, Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, Some kind of we, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

United, Eternal Transcendent and Some kind of we serve as an homage to queer survivance and continuity. Using Robert Flack’s yearning for transcendence as a vessel to communicate the community’s continuous fight for progress, and Gendertroublemakers and polished as examples of the direct passing down of artistic legacies and ambitions, the Art Gallery of Guelph is successfully transformed into a space for reflection on how far the queer community has come in the last 40 years. The collective memory and artistic projects of those who were alive during the AIDS crisis continue to influence generations of queer creators, and though Flack passed away in October of 1993, he has since been solidified within the Canadian art historical canon. His first posthumous solo show at the Art Gallery of Guelph since his passing, Eternal Transcendent exemplifies the ways how Flack achieved a form of transcendence. Flack’s chakras have bore witness to the end of the 1980s/1990s AIDS crisis in North America and the decades that followed. If an art piece carries within it something of its maker, then Flack surely has transcended the confines of his body and transformed into something permanent and unkillable.