Leaky Boundaries: In Conversation with Isabella Covert

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

By Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Femme Demo: In Conversation with Sam Grabowska

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

By Julia Betts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB: Fight or flight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

JB: Oh, it was too feminine to them?

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB: Thank you for speaking with me today!

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

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang at The Polygon Gallery

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

Tireslashers by Charlotte Zhang

The Polygon Gallery

Nov. 28, 2025 – Mar. 29, 2026

By EA Douglas

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Femme Demo: Studio Visit with Jenny Fine

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

Interview by Julia Betts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenny Fine, Ectoplasm, 2025, archival pigment print.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB: Oh my God. 

JF: You might be my yin. 

JB: Wow. This is crazy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Conversation with Laveen Gammie

Architectures of power, green-screen-green, and the politics of In/visibility

Laveen Gammie, Interface (Installation view). Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski.

By Dani Neira

Last autumn, I began stealing loose breeze blocks, the cement building bricks with decorative designs carved out. You can find them stacked precariously outside of houses, creating partitions between the sidewalk and a parking lot, or perhaps as a stand-alone wall. There is a common design that resembles the geometric right angles of a camera’s viewfinder or increasingly ornamental and asymmetrical compositions. I am drawn to how the blocks shape my vision, how their negative spaces carve out slices of blue sky, and how I can catch someone’s eye through their moss-lined craters. 

Around this time, I listened to a podcast episode where Legacy Russell talks about the digital as an architecture, a space where massive corporations aim to control our “viewfinders.” Like the breeze block, algorithms frame what we see, simultaneously revealing and redacting information. Yet, both physical and digital structures can be torn down or defied. Perhaps my wayward collecting of breezeblocks was enacting some small form of rebellion. The mutability of these architectures offers possibilities and ways of slipping through systems that rely on legibility, classification, and censorship. We can understand censorship in this larger context as the suppression of information that is considered a threat to the hegemonic order. This censorship is sometimes literal, such as Canadians not being able to access news on social media platforms or the shadowbanning of pro-Palestinian voices. It is also insidiously embedded as racial and gender biases within technologies purported as neutral. 

While I was pondering breeze blocks, artist Laveen Gammie was looking at green-screen-green, and we were both reading Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell. I first came across Laveen’s installation-based exploration of “green-screen-green” in The Meet Up earlier this year. I’ll note here that Laveen and I are good friends, having met through a virtual studio visit back in 2020. Laveen’s practice is critical, playful, and deliciously material, and I return to it often. Her inquiry into green screens appears in Interface as an immersive space through painting the walls and floor, while in The Meet Up, it takes form in the painted platforms that host ladders and balloons. Both bodies of work interrogate how worldviews are projected upon the green screen and within the process of chroma-keying; the post-production technique of removing a green or blue background and replacing it with a different image.

DN: Many of your recent works, including your installation Interface at Open Space and exhibition The Meet Up at Fortune Gallery, have incorporated “green-screen-green. What drew you to explore green-screen-green, particularly in these physical, material ways?

LG: I was thinking about the invisibility of world-making. In my current work, I’m continuing to look at the idea of reification, or how we impose socially-created meaning on objects. As I was considering how worlds were built, a lot of that came down to film, the images, and the technology we consume. That’s how I came to the green screen, but going deeper, I wanted to ask,  why or how are we chroma-keying? This interest is built on it being something we use because it’s “unlike us,” it’s Other, and we use that colour to then project our own worlds. In that way, the green screen as Other is the sort of labour that never gets recognized. I became interested in the physicality of green-screen-green as a physical object. I wanted to give it recognition for its ability to create worlds and be projected onto. And I just love the colour. I love chroma key green. 

DN: When I first saw your green screen platforms, I was immediately drawn to the colour. Then it got me thinking about the physical object that is the green screen and how we don’t usually see it in a pre-production state.

LG: Exactly. We had to assign each other readings for class, and my classmate picked this reading that was a complete game changer. It’s called “Speech, Writing, Code, Three Worldviews,” by Katherine Hayles. It talks about the use of language as a form of power and how, in the past, restricting who has access to knowing how to utilize language has been a form of power dynamics (withholding power, obtaining power, and perpetuating power). Code has become a form of language that perpetuates power. Who has access to understand that language? Code is an approximation of so many things in our everyday life, meaning you can’t encapsulate everything. And I was like, holy shit, green-screen-greening is also an approximation of a worldview, and the power is held in the person that can project their fantasy or their ideas into the world they’re building. 

DN:  I feel like that also really ties into the idea of censorship or the suppression of information as a power dynamic. Going back to the invisibility of the green screen, I feel like it’s often forgotten that there are humans behind code and algorithms and that there’s no neutrality to technological tools.

LG: I feel like that, too, becomes a redaction. What has been left out of this seemingly finalized world that we are seeing?

DN: Yeah. I was thinking a lot about Legacy Russell’s text Glitch Feminism, where she states that the separation between the digital and the “real world” no longer exists. It made me consider how your work makes the green screen visible, what it means to make the production stage visible, and how that could be considered an “error.” How are you thinking about the conditions of in/visibility in your practice?

LG: The aspect of making the seemingly invisible, made visible, is something I’m still considering. I think green-screen-green is representative of a collaborative process. You need people, you need labour to build worlds, you need this green-screen-green backdrop, you need this sense of Other to create worlds. So bringing that into the context of the gallery and showcasing this form of world-making in its production stages, for me at least, showcases an aspect of labour, what it took to make the context for the objects that then sit on these platforms. Another thing that came up this week for me is what constitutes labour and making. Helen Molesworth brought this up in their recent talk, and it’s been lingering for me.

Laveen Gammie, Social Ladder, wood, green-screen-green paint, acrylic paint, disco ball, 2023. Courtesy of artist.

DN: Your exhibition, The Meet Up, is all about labour and who might have a place in the white-collar meeting or at the top of a corporate ladder…I’m reminded of Legacy’s thoughts on digital architectures. We have these big corporations like Instagram or TikTok which, through their algorithms, are attempting to be invisible in many ways while directly shaping our worldviews and what we consume. I’m also thinking about the relationship of that stage [The Meet Up] to the objects that you placed on top of them and the materials used, the painted ladders, yarn, balloons, and the associations these objects have.

LG: It brings me back to the text “Speech, Writing, Code,” because they approximate everything, they control everything. We just don’t see it. And what we do see is only the tip of the iceberg. In Canada, we can’t see the news, we know that. But there are so many things that are being coded, deleted, hidden, and controlled. The stages and performance bring me back to Legacy’s work, with this idea of gender performance and prescribed roles. Her book has been a game changer for me because I think about the prescribed role of everything. 

The Meet Up is about placing something as simple as a ladder in conversation with green-screen-green. The ladder has truck nuts at the top, and the title is Corporate Ladder. I’d like to think that it challenges the performance of climbing a corporate ladder. I’m commenting on it being a male-dominated industry, but the actual act of climbing a ladder we can all understand. Ladder climbing, in conversation with the idea of labour, brings up questions of who is at the top of the ladder. Who’s climbing or striving to climb the ladder?  What does that performance look like? What does it mean to be at the top? What does it mean to be at the bottom? And balloons as objects are interesting because they’re fleeting, they’re always dying, changing, floating…they’re never going to be the same. I think using balloons became a humorous way of commenting on darker things. Also bringing in the concept of necropolitics by Achille Mbembe, I’m thinking about who has the power to prescribe roles and to stage context. Balloons have a life and death, like us. So it’s also about who has the power to be/hold life or hold people in a place of death. I was thinking, how do I deal with social contexts and labour, while also dealing with this aspect of death and control?

Laveen Gammie, The Meeting, wood, metal, monks cloth, balloons, latex, plastic, yarn, 2023. 
Courtesy of artist.

DN: I love how your work utilizes everyday objects people can connect to. I’m sure everyone has memories and feelings attached to balloons whether through celebrations or get-well balloons. One of my favourite parts of that work was witnessing the balloons at any given time; some had deflated to the floor, while others were still fully inflated or hanging mid-way. In relation to my own body, some of them moved when I did, and others didn’t at all. 

LG: Yeah… there’s an immediacy to them. I move, they move. I come back, they’re not the same. I’m not the same. What does that mean? I very much could have kept pumping them up. But no, you have one life, and you will live out your life in the exhibition space. The balloons being disco balls were also a direct commentary on who gets to enjoy leisure and who has the waged labour of upkeeping leisure for others. 

Laveen Gammie, Interface (Installation view). Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski.

DN: I also wanted to talk about technological biases because that’s very tied to the technique of chroma-keying, which has historically used whiteness as a universal template. There are so many biases embedded in tools like AI, facial recognition, or cameras that are designed to properly expose white skin tones. Chroma-keying has this history where green and blue were decided to be the most “different” from white skin tones specifically. It’s interesting to see how artists are appropriating its language to question the cultural values imposed in their creation. When I started looking into chroma-keying, I re-watched Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational . MOV File, where she proposes blending into these green screens as a way of countering hyper-visibility…Who were you looking at when you were researching green screens? 

LG: I think I was taking a film course at the time. We had just watched Get Out by Jordan Peele, and I was looking at the way they used film to comment on the racist tropes that have existed in film and technology. I then came to green-screen-green because a student at UVic, Rebecca Fux, had made this hyper-realistic painting of their friends where the background is all green screen. It has this glitch moment where not all moments of the painting are complete. I was also exposed to Sondra Perry’s work, Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Work-station: Number One; their family is doing something completely nuclear family, just having dinner, but they’re all wearing [green] balaclavas. So, I was thinking about this prescription of violence that’s imposed on the Other, and it was a rabbit hole from there considering the connotations of green-screen-green and technology as a whole. What are the biases already embedded into the code itself, and who is the power holder in this language? 

DN: OK, to wrap this up… what are you working on or looking into right now?

LG: I’m thinking about unquestioned ritual and museums’ roles in slicing through and reducing ideas of ritual through an aestheticization of objects. That’s where I’m at right now. And…Bling Era. [Both laugh] Preciousness, adornment, what gets dismissed.

You can find more of Laveen Gammie’s work on her website.

This feature can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

Taking up Space: In Discussion with Hanna Washburn

Hanna Washburn in the studio, 2023. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Artist Hanna Washburn’s work is undoubtedly playful and lively. Soft forms bulge, sag, and spill over, camouflaged in bold and delicate floral patterns stitched together. The sculptures are unapologetic, taking up space and asserting themselves, challenging the expectations put on feminine bodies. Washburn often incorporates nostalgic items from her childhood such as dollhouse furniture and her grandmother’s curtains, and other recycled fabrics from her everyday life. Embodying a range from the maternal to the sensual, Washburn’s work highlights the complicated experience of being in a body that is constantly transforming and changing.

Both an artist and a curator, Hanna Washburn is based in Beacon, New York, and holds a BA in Fine Art and English from Kenyon College, and an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, among others. Hanna has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Colony, and the Textile Arts Center. Currently, she works in the Curatorial Department at Storm King Art Center.

Hanna Washburn. Small Step. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Your textile sculptures are so animated and lively. Can you discuss how you’re inspired by the body to create your sculptures?

There is so much of the body in my sculptures, a body caught in the process of morphing and changing. Something that is in flux and not static. I think of my sculptures as representing different versions of the same body in different moods and phases. A body that is slipping between different things, that is many things at once. 

I am also interested in capturing certain moods and gestures with the work, without being too explicit about what exactly is happening. [I use] shapes and movement that make you think of your own body in relation. There are parts of my work that are more unsettling, but I also try to capture the joy of being in a body and the idea that all these different feelings can coexist.

Hanna Washburn. Pink Pivot. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Your sculptures assert themselves and take up space, challenging the associations and expectations put on women and femme bodies with forms that spill and sag over. Can you speak more about this concerning your work?

These things are all connected, what they look like and what they’re about—the body and expectations of femininity. They are layered in together. I construct my sculptures with this kind of patchworking as a visual tool, but it is also this thematic thing of these pieces of identity and body coming together, being stitched together.

I think especially with my freestanding sculptures, I am interested in creating something we have this almost one-to-one relationship with, like the way a viewer connects to it with their own body. This thing that’s standing, burdened but still upright—it’s struggling to stand, but it’s standing. And I think it becomes an exercise in empathy, to see something that is trying to maintain a certain balance. There is something of that I see in myself, and I believe others have that experience too. [Experiencing] how it feels to exist in a body, to feel certain expectations of your body, to feel the pressure of external definitions, so people can see and understand how to categorize you when we are really all un-categorizable. 

Our experiences in the home space are also a big factor in my work. I have a tendency to anthropomorphize things, especially in the home, like furniture. Something that is standing up has this bodily connotation for me, [like an] entity that has a certain stature. I have this irresistible urge to relate to it as a human or a living, bodily thing.

These things are all connected, what they look like and what they’re about—the body and expectations of femininity.

Hanna Washburn. Swell. Photo by Ally Schmaling. Photo courtesy of the artist.

You integrate certain childhood and nostalgic items in your work. Can you explain this inspiration further?

I am a big-time scavenger of things in the world but also of my own life, like clearing out my parent’s attic and pulling [items] that remain from my childhood as these kinds of fossils.

I incorporate things like my old doll beds, or toys or small little objects into my work. If I don’t still have the actual thing it often becomes about its memory. I try to recreate either something I had when I was a child, or an aesthetic that was formative for me. I think about childhood a lot, that identity-forming period. I was always really drawn to objects and creatures. 

I am also interested in the aesthetic of the suburban modesty of my upbringing. A lot of floral patterns, and a lot of muted domestic colors and textures. And again, sometimes I use literal curtains from my grandma’s house. But sometimes it’s about trying to recreate something that I remember or saw in pictures. I am interested in using that kind of modest aesthetic-to take its flatness and make it lumpy.

Hanna Washburn. Curiosities. Photo by Ally Schmaling. Photo courtesy of the artist.

I like how you use recycled fabrics and items from your life. It’s nice from an ecological perspective as well. Have you always been drawn to using textiles as a medium? Can you expand on your interest in using recycled materials and textiles?

Textiles are all around us. We wear them, we live with them in our homes, and we have so many attachments to them. It’s this intimate material we wear on our bodies and sleep in. I think a lot of people are drawn to textiles for reasons of comfort and familiarity. I’ve always really been interested in recycling things, both from an environmental standpoint, but also for the richness of something that has been around for a long time, that has changed hands and has its own memory. 

As far as sewing techniques, I’m a big fan of the whipstitch. It’s one of the first stitches you learn, this overhand, repetitive stitch. It also shows up in surgical stitches, so it has that bodily connotation. I love the visual of how it stitches things together; it’s just such an additive process. And my practice is very improvisational, so when I’m in the studio, I am making visual connections and directly responding and stitching. It feels like this extension of my brain in my hand.

I learned how to sew at home from my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. It’s a practice that I learned and inherited from outside of art school, outside the institution. It feels personal, as something that I learned from women in my family that I’m continuing as well as complicating. Having this practice connected to the personal and the familial makes a lot of sense to me.

Hanna Washburn. Rosy. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Who are some artists (or other things) that inspire you and your practice?

I try to look at as many different things as I can, not just sculpture or fiber art. I like to engage with a lot of other forms of art, too. I love to go to the movies; I love to read fiction. I try to immerse myself in different kinds of storytelling because it adds richness to my practice, but also just as a person in the world, and the way I think about things.

I’m lucky to know so many artists, visual artists and other kinds [of artists] with all different practices. [We have] casual interactions talking about ideas, going to see things, having informal crits, creative exchanges, and collaborations. I think a lot of my daily inspiration comes from surrounding myself with people with that kind of energy. And I treasure it, because it is important to keep questioning and pushing not just your own stuff but looking at so many other things and learning about other people and their practices and their stories. It’s just so enriching. I have my list of visual artists that I turn to again and again, but that daily stuff is equally important to me because it feeds the [creativity].

Check out Hanna Washburn’s work in the upcoming exhibition Homespun, a survey of textile artists in the Hudson Valley at the Samuel Dorksy Museum – SUNY New Paltz, opening on February 4th, 2023. 

Washburn will also be part of the NYC group show, Paroxysm, curated by Alison Pirie, from February 8 – 23rd at Westbeth Gallery, NYC. 

Additionally, Washburn will have a solo show this fall at the Lake George Arts Project from September 23 -October 27th, 2023.

You can find more of her work on her website and Instagram.

Sidney Mullis is Your Long-Lost Imaginary Friend

Sidney Mullis, The Town Between My Toes. Sand, wax, raw rigatoni and shell pasta, pleather, black food coloring, olives, carrots, olive pits, cotton string, resin, wire, wood, paint, rocks, teddy bears. 2019.

By Anna Mirzayan

For an artist interested in the possibilities of space, it seems fitting that Sidney Mullis’ studio is in the basement of a converted church. As we go through the doors down to her studio, the journey still invokes hallow memories. Small ornate windows stand alongside large arched wooden doors— there is even a gargoyle carefully watching as we pass. Mullis’ studio itself is a modern steel and concrete rectangle in premeditated contrast to the aesthetics around it. Most of the space is taken up by several of her large and bizarre installations that seem to reach out as you enter, inviting you to touch their points, joints, and protrusions. Her materials are carefully tucked away in buckets beneath large shelves and tables littered with smaller works. One table houses a sewing machine, surrounded by scraps of the black pleather she is fond of using.

Sidney Mullis. “Shrine for my Pocketed Youth.” Sand Murmurs/Tongue Pockets/Thumb Secrets Installation Shot. Bunker Projects, 2020.

Daughter of an army father, Mullis moved around a lot as a child. She spent her childhood years in Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, and attended undergrad in Virginia before moving to Pennsylvania, where she now resides, for her MFA in sculpture. In the rural South, the gender roles and scripts assigned to her weighed heavily, and she became very attune to how social expectations changed and became more rigid as one aged. This first awareness informed the interest of roles and expectations that she now attempts to point out and subvert in her work. As a teacher of both studio art and art writing at Penn State, Mullis is keenly aware of the position of authority she occupies in the classroom. As in her art practice, she attempts to break down these power dynamics and focuses on having fun in the classroom. As a teacher, Mullis said she quickly learned that the worst thing she could do in adult space was “be childish,” so she asked herself why can’t silly “be here,” in this space?

Sidney Mullis. Purple Bush with Knuckle. Sand, wood, paint, string, handmade paper pulp made primarily of kid’s construction paper and gravestone dust. 2021.

Her work focuses primarily on recreating childhood spaces where one is free to create and imagine, asking how we learn the rigid roles we perform as adults and why we acquiesce to them so readily. She uses craft materials and processes, like sand, paper pulp (as in Purple Bush with Knuckle), Styrofoam and dried macaroni, along with unusual materials like gravestone dust (which she uses as a binder), and insists on doing everything by hand, to evoke the playful creation of childhood. Figuring out the processes for using the materials is itself a recreation of childhood play. The sand that makes up large pieces like Three Thumb Secret Keeper harken back to sandboxes and sandcastles and are part of Mullis’ goals of making landscapes as play spaces. The ingredients for the treated sand itself are kept under wraps like a childhood secret. The small spheres she uses as embellishments are made from individual wax grapes that are filled like molds and then cut apart one by one— a super laborious process that evokes the tension between play and tedium.

Sidney Mullis. Sand Murmurs/Tongue Pockets/Thumb Secrets. Bunker Projects, 2020. Installation Shot.

Mullis stumbled across one of her more macabre materials by accident. She was looking for somebody to drill rocks she collected to use as counterbalances for her trees and thought to try a longtime family-owned gravestone carver as a last resort. They broke every rock. However, the carvers were using leftover gravestone dust to cast small sculptures (one of them even made teeth for dentists on the side) and offered Mullis as much of it as she could carry. Mullis says she was fascinated by the joyful way the carvers created new objects from leftovers. Although losing a life is not quite the same as losing a tooth, both processes create some form of existence from death. “Parts of you die, parts survive,” says Mullis. Life is full of transformations. Her use of materials like gravestone dust to make playful objects reminds us that childhood is linked not just to joy but to loss as well. It is important to memorialize the dark and the difficult, and not to paint childhood with the rosy brush of nostalgia.

Her use of materials like gravestone dust to make playful objects reminds us that childhood is linked not just to joy but to loss as well.

Sidney Mullis, Altar to Resurrect my 7-year-old Self. Handmade paper pulp, gravestone dust, wax, sand, dry rigatoni and manicotti pasta, pleather, black streamers, discarded teddies, olive pits, paint, wire, shells & coins from childhood collections. 2017-2019.

Mullis makes sure to lean into the dark and the strange in her work. The center of her studio is populated by two large trees merging into an arch. The denizens of the “Forest” are made of starfish-like pillows made of black pleather. Because of the sensual material, adults who wander through the wood often read sexual innuendo into the works, associating them with queerness, leather, and BDSM. Mullis explains that she was more interested in the disorienting juxtaposition between the objects as pillows and their spiky appearance; however, she is also quick to remind us, pleasure is playful.

The works oscillate between attractive and repulsive, strange, and familiar. Some tower over the viewer, creating the scale of childrens’ vision, while others are toys that are strewn about the space, waiting on the ground to be discovered. The studio is an alluring sand and paper monument to the dwindling arts of childhood imagination, in both its joyful and nightmarish valences. Moving through Mullis’ invented spaces is a surprisingly intimate experience. She hovers on the periphery, allowing me to discover at my own pace. In the end, she gives me a small resin and gravestone dust keychain—one of a set made by squeezing the material until an impression of her hand remained— a memento mori, she says.

History is Full of Fiction

“History is Full of Fiction:” In conversation with Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Timo Kaabi-Linke

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital – Epilogue: The Fable of the End of an Era, 2020. Installation with found monument, video and sound; variable dimensions, 12’07” © Photo: TiKL 2020 courtesy of the artist and Darat Al Funun the Khaled Shoman Foundation.

By Jess Chen

Writing about the collapse of the bourgeoisie, Walter Benjamin remarked that material residue preserves a kind of dream-world, an image of the future. “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams about the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”[1] Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a collector and archaeologist of such residue, the traces of what has been and what could be. She excavates the everyday by retrieving detritus; coffee grounds, scrap metal, paint chips, and even dust become source material for her work. That which has been overlooked, or deemed waste, constitute the means through which Kaabi-Linke dismantles the clean narrative arc. Capitalism, war, colonialism, domestic abuse—these are her subjects, storylines defined by their destruction, tragic irony, and ultimately, regret. Kaabi-Linke composes extended metaphors of longing and deferred hope from these ruins.

Kaabi-Linke’s own trajectory began in Tunisia, where she studied painting at the University of Fine Arts, Tunis, before moving to Paris to complete a Ph.D. in Art Theory at the Sorbonne. Kaabi-Linke now lives and works in Berlin with her partner and collaborator Timo, a sociologist. They also spend time in Kyiv, Ukraine, her mother’s hometown. It comes as no surprise that Kaabi-Linke is a keen observer of how history and geography color personal experience. She probes the miasma of fear and greed that marks history in her latest work, Das Kapital—Epilogue: The Fable of the End of An Era, a scathing critique of our economic system.

Das Kapital, on view at Darat al Funun, is a video installation with several found objects: a metal gate propped upright by a pile of tawny, unpolished stones and a weathered electric cable. The objects come from Amman, Jordan, where Nadia and Timo noticed a plot of land between two townhouses, empty except for the gate, stones, and cable. After conducting interviews with nearby residents, which became part of the installation, they learned that there used to be a house on the land. Its owner had a dream in which her father said there was treasure buried underneath the house. She went to work accordingly, evicting the tenants and destroying the building, but she found nothing.

Das Kapital is a potent metaphor for the corrosive desires of capitalism. The work is more relevant than ever today when the COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted hundreds of thousands of people into financial precarity, even as large corporations continue to profit. In my interview with Nadia and Timo, we discuss the implications of Das Kapital, their approach to revealing history’s fictions, and how we might imagine a post-capitalist society.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital – Epilogue: The Fable of the End of an Era, 2020. Installation with found monument, video and sound; variable dimensions, 12’07” © Photo: TiKL 2020 photo courtesy of the artist and Darat Al Funun the Khaled Shoman Foundation.

Jess Chen (JC): I was captivated by the way in which mythology or fiction figures in the work: first in the backstory, in which the landlord follows a dream, and in your subtitle, Fable of the End of an Era. But these fictions have had concrete consequences on real people, places, and things, and these consequences can turn into historical fact. How do you interpret this relationship between fiction and history?

Nadia Kaabi-Linke (NKL): Actually, I always thought there is little place for fiction in the way we [her and Timo] deal with history. But history is full of fiction, that being said, because there is always narrative. There is no historical fact. Historians work with theories and histories of books, which give us narratives. Depending upon which regime you live in, which time you live in, I learned to understand that fiction is really part of history.

But our approach as artists tries to avoid that. We work with prints, we work with direct contact with people and take pieces and bits of life. [We] compose objects and create a grammar of things. In the case of “Das Kapital,” we say it is an urban legend. You can say a dream is fiction, but it’s a concrete dream she has had.

It depends on the culture where you live also. For some people, dreams are communications with the spirits or the universe. This [Das Kapital] is an example of a lady who took the dream as reality, so she believed it completely.

Timo Kaabi-Linke (TKL): Your question is very sociological, as I understand it. In sociology, you have two histories: the history that is operated within and followed by a rationalist regime, which is relating facts and archives and documents, and doing a reflection of your own interpretation of these documents. Through source analysis, you try to get objectivity in your research.

On the other hand, as you try to be objective, you must consider yourself as a subject in this history—as something that was created and made by this process. You need to question all your methods, so this objectivity resides in the fact that you need to look at history that has an effect on people and social life. I’m not talking about the history created from the archives, I’m talking about the lived history and the oral histories, like urban legends. We must say that the subjective part of history, which is composed of many, many individual stories is much more effective than anything you can prove on paper.

JC: There are always those gaps in the archive you can never fully fill.

TKL: When we come to Das Kapital, the fact that they changed the law to rebuild and reconstruct the city was less important to the woman than the dream she had, and she relied on this dream more than the printed law sent by the government.

NKL: When you listen to the video, to all the interviews we made, there is always the same story with deviations. I see it as a kind of aural sculpture because it’s as if through the voice of the people you are turning around the situation and it becomes three-dimensional. Some of them say it is a woman, but several say it’s not a woman. They are an extremely rich family, and this is one of the houses they have in Amman. Most of them live in foreign countries, and some say the dream came to a sister [who didn’t live in Amman], and she consulted with all of her family members and decided that they would do this [find the treasure]. Because they are a rich family, they blocked the street from one end to the other. The army was involved to protect the whole process.

TKL: The government involved itself in order to avoid public upheaval, because they feared that people would all claim the fortune.

NKL: It makes total sense why the army and government would be so much involved. This neighborhood was not very rich, but it was in the most historical part of Amman. The treasures are not their [the landlord’s] ancestors.’ [It’s] something maybe 800 years old, or more, so they don’t have the right to it. If there was something, it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to Jordan.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital – Epilogue: The Fable of the End of an Era, 2020. Installation with found monument, video and sound; variable dimensions, 12’07” © Photo: TiKL 2020 courtesy of the artist and Darat Al Funun the Khaled Shoman Foundation.

JC: Going back to taking these bits and pieces of reality for your work, how do you avoid reproducing those fictions or myths?

TKL: We work a lot with reproductions, but when you reproduce, when Nadia takes prints from walls, she’s in direct contact. Not reproduction but a transfer of a texture. The print cannot exist without the original and is not identical to the original, because it is a pattern, while the original is an object. This is a critical approach to the idea of reproduction.

When you put the different stories with slight deviations together, you realize how this is constructed, and you see that there is a common myth that everyone makes something out of.

In this work, we reproduced the gate and took original elements from the site to rearrange them in the exhibition space. This was not a transfer—it was a transposition. We wanted to cut it out of the original environment and put it in the clinical environment of the exhibition venue, a kind of petri dish. When you put it in a different place, where it doesn’t belong, then it becomes visible.

We did the same thing with the recordings. When you put the different stories with slight deviations together, you realize how this is constructed, and you see that there is a common myth that everyone makes something out of. When you align these stories, you become aware that this is all construction.

NKL: I would say that we don’t try to avoid reproduction—we work with it. We work with prints and imprints, and in this case, we didn’t want to touch the gate. We made a re-enactment and reproduced the whole thing. When you asked your question, it made me think of Urinal by Duchamp, although it’s not my favorite work. You take an object and reproduce it as it is. No one looked at it before. But when you take it out of its context and you put it within the white cube, you look at it with new eyes.

JC: I was going to ask about the Duchamp, actually. The found object.

NKL: Yeah, Duchamp is not the best example because there are very strong theories…it’s very possible the first readymade was produced by a woman. Another patriarchal myth.

TKL: Still, once you do something with pre-existing elements, you don’t try to ignore or invisibilize or overlook the fact that you work with reproductions. Put it on the table. Think about it and ask the questions: How can I make this reproducibility visible? How can I work with it in a way that the reproduction is so strong that nobody would dare to think, “Wow, this is original.” That kind of originality in art is a big myth of modern art.

JC: I’m interested specifically in the reproduction of narrative. You mentioned those recordings in the video installation of different people retelling the urban legend. How do you avoid one master narrative coming out? Is that a concern of yours?

NKL: There is one story, so the only variations are slight. Some say it’s only the woman, some others say it’s her and especially her brothers and sisters who took over and she [the woman] doesn’t even live in Amman. There was a big question about the gate. Who built it? Is it the gate from the house? Some say yes, some say no. There was a homeless man who came and collected it. Some said he cared for it, some said he was crazy or had a mental illness.

But the line is clearly the dream, the gold, the treasure, destruction, and losing everything.

The core idea, why we called it Capital and Epilogue, is because the gate should separate the outer and inner space and protect the inner space. But it’s not holding itself. It’s being held by stones, by an electric cable, and by a branch, so everything is super precarious. We saw in this gate the metaphor for the post-capitalist era.

I have a feeling that the coronavirus has pushed us toward something. And nevertheless, all the governments in the world, instead of questioning everything and asking how to save us, hold onto a system that is built on blood and destroying the planet. Total nonsense—the gate is nonsense [too]. It’s not holding itself, it’s the cable and some stones holding it. That’s why the narrative, the story is important. It’s like a skeleton.

TKL: I was thinking about the guy who lives in this area. He created some kind of a poetic plot because he’s actually at the other end of the social scale. He’s homeless, he has nothing, but he got a place where he could be at night, where he could leave his things during the day. This is huge for someone who has nothing. So there was a treasure in the ground.

The funny thing is that he decorated this place in the typical capitalist fashion. “This is mine—here’s a fence—don’t go further—this is now my place.” He appropriated it. He should be the guy explaining to us why capitalism isn’t working.

JC: That reminds me of salvage capitalism. Being on the edges of capitalism and making a place for yourself.

TKL: Yes. As Nadia said, the beginning of capitalism was always bloody, in all societies, and it was not so long ago. Especially if you look at the United States, you can go a few generations back and find the guy who draws the fence.

In Europe, it’s a bit more complicated. We have the feudal system that intervenes, but it’s the same logic, all about property. The point is capitalism is something like a dead-born child. It could never live, it could never really work. This is how it can deal with problems and crises. People are saying this is late capitalism and the end of the capitalism. I think that crisis is all capitalism needs.

JC: Thinking about Das Kapital, the first thing that came to my mind was that quote attributed to Fredric Jameson, that “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

TKL: In my sense, this has become so outdated. This is something you would think of with Francis Fukuyama, the end of history.

JC: And yet so many people still have this mindset.

NKL: Some take it as a system like weather, or conditions like water or air. No, it’s not that. It’s not vital.

JC: I have one last question. We’re talking about the destruction of capitalism and how coronavirus is pushing capitalism even faster so that systems are at the brink. If we get to the point where we decide we have to build a new system, what are you imagining and what kind of structuring principle(s) are you imagining for the future?

TKL: It’s quite difficult to fathom the possibilities of the future so I won’t do that. But what I could do and what triggers my interest is what already exists. It’s incredible how reflective people have become about money. Modern Money Theory (MMT) creates public awareness that money doesn’t exist. It’s not a substantive medium. When you take money from a bank, it’s not that there’s less money when you take it. No, they give the debt that the bank has for you to someone else to deal with it. Everything that we exchange is not money. It is not like gold that is sold and someone else is now the new owner. It’s a program of behavior. These discourses would bring so much awareness to this. If people start thinking this way, society would totally change the idea of property and come to a culture of sharing and caring.

NKL: This is for me also. Sharing and caring, that’s for me a dream, and I think we can reach it. People think it is in the nature of humans to be greedy, to accumulate. It is as much in human nature, when someone smiles at you, to feel a second of incredible happiness, and we need that. That’s why all the films and songs are always about love, because this what we need and that’s what anchors us. I don’t want to be romantic here. Love for me is something very concrete, very real, tangible, that I experience every day. Even when I’m angry, there is a part of love in it also.

It is as Timo said, sharing and caring. It is the opposite of capitalism.

—-

 Das Kapital is a timely exploration of the consequences of capitalism. The work’s strength, however, lies in how it beckons to the future using the ruin as artistic strategy. Ruins are evidence of both fragility and destruction, of human life and of marginalized histories. My conversation with Nadia and Timo shows how they can also serve as a starting point for imagining a more equitable system. Nadia’s work is on view at Aicon Gallery, New York, from March 3—April 17.

[1] Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), 13.

Making Attachments: In Discussion with Barbara Weissberger

Barbara Weissberger. Alter-hand, 2019. Photo documentation by Ivette Spradlin. Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Anna Mirzayan

Barbara Weissberger’s mixed-media creations feature a complex interplay between soft sculpture and photography. Her playfully staged images invite viewers to consider the nature of meaning, embodiment, and attachment. Recently, she has been delving more into sewing and other art forms traditionally labelled as ‘craft work,’ placing herself in the rich history of women in craft arts.

In 2019, Weissberger visited the Whitney’s ongoing exhibition Making and Knowing: Craft in Art (2019), which showcases a diversity of so-called craft art over seven decades, bringing together a historical litany of artists who use a wide array of materials and techniques from glass to sewing, pottery, and mosaic. Some artists at the Whitney make explicit connections between so-called women’s work and craft; Liza Lou’s Kitchen (1996) is a painstakingly crafted bead mosaic based on the 1950s American kitchens and a particular role that women’s labor, both material and emotional, played during that period of American industrialization. The resurgence of interest in art that references craft, coupled with Weissberger’s recent work with sewing and quilting, prompted this conversation. We discuss her ongoing interest in assemblage and embodiment, as well as the evolution of her work and the relationship between craft arts and feminist ideologies.

Anna: As a woman artist working in sculpture, collage and photography, do you feel that you fit in the lineage of artists and techniques represented by this exhibition? If so, how? And were you influenced directly by any of the artists from the show?

Barbara: I would say that my work has been inching toward craft over a very long time. I started as a sculptor and at a certain point I felt like I had hit a wall with objects, and I made a somewhat abrupt turn to making drawings, works on paper and collage, and, through a long circuitous route, arrived at making the photo-based work that I’ve been making for several years. I use a lot of cardboard and discarded material, so there was already this inkling of craft, DIY ‘low materials.’ But I think it was still rooted very much in ‘fine art’ traditions, as opposed to craft traditions. Now I’m making these photo quilts, so it’s very explicitly connected to craft forms.

Barbara Weissberger. More Fragile but More Enduring. 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

You mentioned that you started in sculpture, and there’s often also a dimension of photography in your work. But you print the photography, often on these non-traditional, softer substances, even if they’re mounted on the wall, some of them are more free-flowing. How do you see the relationship between photography, sculpture and the soft materials in your work?

Photography and sculpture have a long and intertwined relationship. After many years of making sculpture, I moved to drawing and collage using my own photographs. Eventually I started printing those, and then I started making installations with the photo fragments that I was using in the collages. And in documenting one such installation, something turned for me. I realized that I was quite interested in making such installations in my studio and making photographs of those. It was never quite exactly documentation, but the camera and photographs were a way of framing, organizing and keeping an artifact of what were temporary installations in the studio.

            For a long time, my photographs were printed on paper and then I often would treat the frame in some way to make it part of the photographic image. I might have an image printed on paper and also on fabric, then wrap the frame with the fabric. And in that way, that photographic image would expand out from the print. I was always trying to bring the photograph back into this realm of objects, which is where it came from, right? It came from this physical arrangement of things in space and I wanted to return it to that.

            Printing on fabric came out of an installation called GENERAL DELIVERY 59631 (2016) that I did at Incident Report in Hudson, NY, which was the first time that I had photographs printed on fabric. I quickly realized that printing the digital image on fabric made a very ephemeral image incredibly physical, and it would move in the wind with suppleness and fluidity. It was yet another way to make the image have this kind of physical embodiment.

Barbara Weissberger. Slash and Burn, 2020.

You say that you’ve now more fully embraced sewing and you have these quilts. It seems like you’ve been inching, as you said, more towards, for something that we would firmly call “craft.” What’s at stake for you in that move towards more craft objects and how does that fit with or change the overall themes of your work?

I thought about sewing and its relation to art-making [for a while]. I resisted it for a couple of reasons, partly because of learning to sew as a kid and feeling that it was connected to domesticity and femininity, in ways that I was not interested in attaching myself to. I also felt that there were lots of feminist artists who had made work in the generation before me who had beautifully mined those traditions. I just put it out of my mind, because it felt linked to craft and women’s work in a way that I did not want to embrace. So naturally, here I am embracing it!

I would say that my interest in bodies has always driven the work. It’s a discourse associated with female bodies and feminist perspectives (at least in Western art traditions), which has to do with boundaries, with fluidity, with anxieties about female bodies, with an idea of bodies as unruly things, tensions between control and unruliness. Sometimes it’s difficult to parse the space in my images. Even that instability has to do with boundaries and containment, and, ultimately, links back to some of those notions of bodies as container versus spills or unruliness. And then sometimes explicitly, there are body parts, fragmentary body parts, often mostly hands and feet, which are, arguably, not gendered (or able to move around gender).

Barbara Weissberger. Navel, 2019. Photo documentation by Ivette Spradlin, courtesy of the artist.


I think of bodies and attachment, and about how a viewer’s body might feel in relation to the work—intimacy and separation is the relationship between artwork and viewer.

Freud has this word unheimlich, which means ‘not at home,’ but in English it’s ‘uncanny,’ and its etymology fits with what you’re talking about, about not being in the domestic space, not being at home, in the body, all of these sorts of things. I saw your show, Mother (2019) at The Silver Eye Center for Photography, and your collaborative show with Eleanor Aldrich, The Soft State of Custodia (2020), at Bunker Projects, and I noticed many of these themes in both of the shows. What are the most impactful and memorable exhibitions that you’ve done, and how did it evolve your relationship to your practice?

The exhibition Mother was a key one for me. A lot of that show was about separation. I think of bodies and attachment, and about how a viewer’s body might feel in relation to the work—intimacy and separation is the relationship between artwork and viewer.  To make some of the photographs, I cut a hole in a piece of paper that I’ve painted – or cut a hole in a photographic print or a piece of cardboard – and hold that right in front of the camera lens when I make the image.  So, then a blurry aperture is in the foreground of the resulting image and that aperture acts as a frame within the picture, framing whatever so-called subject is in there.

 When I look at those images, it heightens my sense of looking out of my own body. The image becomes this kind of opening in a screen, like looking out of your eye and then into another opening. I think it heightens the sense of embodiment for the viewer.

For the fabric photographs I am making now, for the quilts, I’ve been sticking a knee-high pantyhose on my arm. And putting objects, like I have one of a banana in the stocking…so in the image, it’s my arm and hand enclosed in a stocking with some kind of object in there. And I’ve been thinking of those as attachments—a kind of hybrid—a body and a thing as one, and a way of attaching a thing to a body. And I do think it’s funny that I did a show titled Mother and was thinking about separation. I even had a piece in Mother titled Hold Me in which people were invited to pick up and hold these blobby large limb-like soft sculptures. And I thought, oh, funny, I made a transitional object for everyone! And so just to stick with the Freudian early childhood theme, I thought, oh, and now I’m making attachments.

And the quilts—I can’t help but think about a security blanket, particularly in our age of great anxiety; a blanket that covers, that comforts, that keeps warm, that sustains… which is not unrelated to mothers. It’s been amusing me thinking about making those quilts because they are the first body of work that I’m making after Mother.

Barbara Weissberger. Elephant, 2019.

That’s all very intimate, and I think that feels very vulnerable to do in a public place. It is almost opposed to the attitude that a lot of people have going into a museum space, or a formal gallery space because it’s so formalized and public. Even though a lot of artworks lend themselves to these really strong feelings, people are very private and individualized in museums. That’s sort of the antithesis of what you’re doing with dissolving boundaries and reforming attachments and inviting these different kinds of attachments. Quilts are meant for bodies, to enclose them, they’re meant to be warm, they’re meant to be comforting… so in a lot of ways they don’t lend themselves to this world of the virtual that we find ourselves in with COVID. Many artists have responded with new ways of making art, but I would call your quilts ‘anti-Zoom’ in a certain sense. Why is it important for you to keep making these tangible works during COVID?

Perhaps there is something to the physicality of the object. This is what I think is missing; I love that we can go to talks that are being held in cities far flung from where we are, and we can hear music and go to readings, and we can do all these things. And we can see pictures, we can see digital images, we can see screen images. But what we don’t have is being in physical proximity with artwork and having not only a visual but a physical relationship to it, with temperature and sound and smell and scale and material.

I have been posting images of the quilts but when I do that, I think of it as a placeholder. In reality, looking at a photograph always involves a physical dimension.

Barbara Weissberger. Adoration, 2019.Photo courtesy of the artist.

Part of what I was referring to with the experience of the museum space is, particularly with experiencing something like photography or painting, and even sculpture and installation, can really put you into this almost purely perceptive hypnosis, where you’re just this solipsistic, Cartesian cogito, and that’s how you’re looking at the art. I think that that’s very pernicious.

At Olafur Eliasson’s 2019 show at The Tate, Olafur Eliasson: In real life, there was an older piece that wasn’t accessible, but the Tate decided to just leave the piece as-is, and that it wouldn’t be accessible to anyone other than an able-bodied person. Eliasson’s wall text said something about how when you go to a museum or a gallery, and you’re looking at art, you ‘move as if [you] don’t have a body.’ And I read that, in response to this Ciara O’Connor who writes for the Irish Sunday Independent, and who’s not able-bodied, said ‘I am always, ALWAYS aware of my body.’  Looking at art is disarming, vulnerable, and intimate, which may be part of why museum spaces have an unspoken protocol of privacy and discretion.

Yes, and there are so many protocols against tactility— these taboos of not touching the art, and in some cases that makes sense; some pieces are fragile objects, and the materials lend themselves to corroding and eroding over time. And somehow that’s not acceptable. The temporality is not part of the work in a certain sense. Yet you have these works that are asking to be touched. It seems like that connects with your use of discarded or cheap or easily accessible objects and, which fights against the high/low art dichotomy. Can you talk a bit about that aspect of your work?


I use cheap materials, I use scraps, I recycle things a lot. Things cycle through the work; I might have a photograph printed on a fabric more than once, for various reasons. And then that means that certain bits of imagery appear in multiple pieces. I think using scraps is connected to an ethos of working that considers waste. Using what’s at hand also has to do with improvisation and making do with what you have. In addition to that, particularly with fabric, it’s very connected to the tradition in quilt making of using the fabric scraps, of not throwing them out, which is something about making the quilts that really suits me. It’s like I already have what I need in this stack of things that I haven’t yet looked at in quite the right way. And in that way, a photograph also becomes raw material.

Your work brings the material to the fore, which makes me consider the relationship to waste and trash in different ways. You’re using ready-to-hand materials. And to me, it strikes me as so different from ready-mades, which were considered art largely due to the critical discourse around them. What about your relationship to the things you make, and their status as art vs. object?

Apropos to what you’re saying about this teasing feeling between the functional object and the art object, how you decipher and determine or designate really goes back to the actual object and its application, and perhaps the uncomfortable way that it might slip between those. Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and it’s a somewhat new thought for me, has to do with the quilts and this idea of use and function. When I’m sitting in the studio and my studio gets really cold in the winter, and I think, “well, I have all these quilts…” They’re funny shapes, and I finish them with grommets, so they hang on the wall. But still, they are quilted and I’m putting batting in them, so they give warmth. They have this other aspect to them where they are not far from how they would function or be used as the thing that they are, and yet they’re not that thing; they are also the thing on the wall, pictorial, collage-like. Quilts are collages, they are fragments joined together.

Barbara Weissberger. Punchline (diptych), 2019. Photo Documentation by Ivette Spradlin, courtesy of the artist.

One thing that jumped out at me in Mother was that there were no object labels or titles or attributions, which made the viewer work hard and also resisted fixed interpretation. That was a fecund aspect of the show for me, yet I also found it anxiety-producing as a person who goes to museums a lot and sees a lot of object labels. Having that support structure suddenly removed was very jarring, and then I sort of embraced it. It really opened me up to a feeling that I’m not very open to when I go to museums, which is humor—art can be so serious. There’s a lot of slapstick and funny stuff in your work. What do you think is the role of humor in artwork and in the works that you’re making?


I find joking irresistible, and it’s irrepressible. It’s like a language. Humor is a language that I like to speak or feel comfortable speaking. But also, I think that humor in artworks can somehow poke at that tension between high and low art.

Since you are concerned with bodies, one aspect of the body is age. Earlier you mentioned coming up in a certain world and resisting traditional feminized roles. I’m interested in how your age has factored in, if at all, to your art and you as an artist and whether or not your work has changed as you’ve grown?

You were talking about how in the museum it’s about preservation and not decay. With the presence of bodies, you’re speaking about mortality, living and dying bodies. I think as you age, you think about mortality differently, and that changing relationship to mortality is something that I feel in the work. I think I felt that with Mother; I would not have made an exhibition and a body of work that was titled ‘Mother’ when I was younger. I don’t even think I would have looked at that kind of vulnerability around attachment and separation in quite the same way.

I think one of the things for me with the collaboration with Eleanor [Aldrich], who’s of a generation younger than mine, is the delightful co-existence of our differences and connections, it really brings to life what we’re doing. There’s something hopeful about it. We often say there’s what each of us is doing and then when we come together it’s like another life for the objects that we’re making—it’s a third thing.

Barbara Weissberger was recently part of Modicum, a group exhibition at Artspace New Haven. She is currently working on a series of photo quilts. In addition to being a Guggenheim Fellow and a past participant in the Drawing Center Open Sessions program, she is also on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in Studio Arts. You can see more of her work on her website or by following her on Instagram.