Solo Show
Chapter NY
2023
In CLOSER, white women, specifically femme-identifying celebrities, are deconstructed as false arbiters of progress and unknowing accomplices in the subjugation of vulnerable populations. At odds with the allegedly subversive or abject characters they frequently represent in film and TV, insidious cover up queens, the celebrity relishes their status awarded to them by the oppressive, dominant culture that they serve.
A series of prints combine images of actors winning awards—such as Olivia Colman, Frances McDormand, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, among others—with poetic, fictional testimonies of people ‘coming to’. Examples of ‘coming to’ include botched suicides, waking from night terrors or gaining consciousness. The women depicted in the images, with open mouths and languid eyes, embody extreme examples of achievement. The accompanying text, however, articulates a world where being awake, gaining consciousness, or living life under the structures of power feels like a loss—where living is equated with mourning.
People often say they dream of winning an award. Winning lives inside of our unconscious minds yet remains largely unattainable. CLOSER extends upon my ongoing Against Coming series, where coming, arriving, or winning in phallocentric terms is continually thwarted. Obfuscation is the gesture that breaks apart these ascendent and unavoidably elitist aspirations to make space for collective reimaginings of a culture built with love.
