Sick Pleaures Exhibition

“I am not interested here in learning how we might better pass, but in how we might enjoy that which we have been taught to abhor.” Frances Hatherly, “Against ‘Good Taste’: Class, Corpulence, and the Subversive Pleasure of Unfit Femnities”

Sick Pleasures is the culmination of my time at the Pacific Northwest School of Art’s Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies program. This collection of multi-media sculptures draw on the embodied experiences of chronic pain, fatness, and femininity, as well as collective histories of biomedical violence, by exploring contradictions of material/preformative, mundane/sensational, intimacy/invasion cover/exposure, attraction/repulsion, sickness/wellness, public/private, pain/pleasure, inside/outside, and childish/perverse through abstractions that are both playful and unsettling.

Titles, Materials, and Descriptions

(from top left to bottom right)

Meat Curtain, Latex, power mesh, glue, baby powder, tension rod, and shower hooks: A beige, skin-like 5 ft x 5 ft sheet is penetrated and hung by shower hooks on a tension rod enclosing the exhibition space.  

Caul, Latex, human hair, power mesh, and thread: a 3 ft x 2 ft a beige, textured sheer layer partially enveloping a light pink mesh sheet intertwined with hair with a border of vaginal pink folds. 

Cut Up, Tulle and thread: a sheer pink, delicate fabric is stitched with various levels of tension pinned sagely pinned to the wall creating a 4 ft x 2 ft torso-like shape. 

Cloy, pink gloss fake leather, jewelry chain, broach, thread, and polyfill: a shiny, pink leather is stitched together in the shape of a stomach strangled by a gold jewelry chain wrapped around the top several times before continuing to the left to a broach. 

Lumpykins, Latex, plastic bags, hair extension, and flour: A shapeless pink and red lump is encased in a sheer, yellow material on a pedestal with a piece of hair hanging from it. 

Baby Face, Latex, acrylic paint, baby powder, gold frame, and spray paint: a floppy baby doll mask with a rash-like texture is contained by a golden, ornate frame.

Stuffed, Pink stretch velvet, thread, and polyfill: a 30 ft rope entangled to mimic intestines.  

Flipper, Bubble gum, epoxy, and plastic teeth: a shiny pink slug-like u-shape form with teeth.

Pink stretch velvet, thread, and polyfill. 

Gavage, Funnel, latex, lipstick, and plastic tubing: a gold funnel attached to a long, clear tube high up on the wall hung into a u-ship which leads into a a mouth-cast at mouth-level on the wall. 

Gash, Thread, hair extensions, latex, satin, felt, baby powder, and fish hooks: a 2.5 x 2 skin like rectangle with a cut haphazardly stitched together with black thread in the center accepted at the bottom with cascading hair emerging like a waterfall. The piece is hung taunt with fish hooks, causing a shadow on the wall.