Adorned

May 30 – June 25, 2021

Karen Asher, Rah Eleh, Jeremy Laing, Robert Anthony O'Halloran, Jonah Strub, Sarah May Taylor, Shellie Zhang

Curated by Laura Carusi

Video documentation by Miles Rufelds can be seen here.

Adorned is a group exhibition that explores the messy ways women, queer and trans people paint, poke and primp themselves. It traces the tensions and contradictions of luxuriating in what we know to be the seduction techniques of a capitalist system. It respects and considers the materiality of gendered consumer objects, and their power.

The aesthetics of glamour and excess have long been employed as a means of transgressing norms of moderation and measure, with the potential to function as both a resource for subversion and a source of oppression. These experiential contradictions overwhelm subjects. Feelings of perplexity mark the tension between overlapping, opposing and asymmetric forces of power.

What does it mean to derive pleasure from the always-complicated performance of gender and sexuality? To sometimes revel in the artifice of glamour, beauty and excess?

Seven artists present themes of class, race, queerness, gender exploration, beauty and stereotype. Straddling the lines between tenderness and danger, vulnerability and revolt. Glamour, intimacy and stigma are explored through the lens of portraiture, both photographic and sculptural.

Bathed in the glow of the ring light, we are made-up and undone and mended. Frilled and floral, hairy and beautiful, sometimes staring blankly at the ceiling.


_{Photo documentation courtesy of Toni Hafkenscheid}