Maggie Borowitz & Frances Lee

In a phrase penned in 1938, the Surrealist theorist André Breton described Frida Kahlo’s paintings as “like a ribbon around a bomb.”¹Quoted in Geoffrey T. Hellman and Harold Ross, “Ribbon Around Bomb,” The New Yorker, November 12, 1938. The force of Breton’s metaphor lies in the incongruity of a ribbon and a bomb: a delicate, feminine adornment applied to the exterior of a powerful and dangerous interior full of potential energy. But the assumption that ribbons and bombs are incongruous is worth attending to. It points to the ways that formal and material elements that are associated with the feminine have been held apart from art that makes serious comment or has the power to effect real change. The exhibition put a bow on it. probes this tension, investigating how the ribbon itself—that frivolous, floppy, feminine-associated symbol—might bring its own sort of potency.

Nearing a century since Breton’s pithy description, the gendered associations of certain subject matters, formal strategies, materials, making processes, and iconographies (ribbons and bows among them) continue to cause trouble. Their perceived relationship to femininity seems to result in those elements being viewed as surface-level effects: artistic moves that are lacking in creativity, originality, or depth, and that aren’t worth attention. Yet artists continue to be drawn to the elements of this vocabulary, exploring the creative possibilities they present on both a visual and material level. In fact, in our roles as teachers of art and art history, we have observed a seemingly growing interest in exploring this vocabulary among our students—a fascination with what we are calling “girl stuff.”

“Girl stuff” is a category that we see operating in the practices of artists that employ a wide variety of mediums, come from different generations, and may or may not identify as “girls.” Bringing a group of work created by contemporary Chicago-based artists into dialogue, the exhibition put a bow on it. seeks to not only map this category, but to provoke consideration of the range and depth of the formal strategies of which it consists. In this essay, we expand on those provocations. We propose that taking “girl stuff” seriously can reveal its subversive, disruptive, and generative potentialities. No longer wrapped around the bomb, the ribbon itself is imbued with its own explosive potential. It becomes a fuse that can set off big ideas: critiques of hegemonic structures, reflections on the human condition, and imaginings of new versions of our world.

Unapologetically Feminine Iconographies

“Girl stuff” engages with iconographic vocabularies that summon up femininity and that often stem from mass culture as opposed to high art. Employing iconographies that permeate our mass mediascape, artists like Flor Flores, Matt Morris, and Mari Eastman ask what it means to turn to those conventions and images that are frequently gendered female and try to work something out. Their engagement with mass culture and the ways its iconographies have been held apart from high art vocabularies unveils that, in certain ways, mass culture continues to be gendered female and, as a result, devalued. As cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen has argued, since at least the nineteenth century, mass culture was viewed as the purview of women and held in opposition to what he cheekily describes as “real, authentic culture.”² Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. Their strategies of copying, appropriating, and—crucially—intervening in these iconographies disrupt notions of a monolithic, universal form of femininity and call attention to the ways originality and its associations with the inventive, masculine avant-garde has always been a myth. ³See Rosalind E. Krauss’s foundational discussion of the mythic qualities of originality in the modernist tradition in her “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 151–70.

In Flor Flores’s paintings from their Kiki Works series, there is a limited iconographic vocabulary—flowers, hearts, butterflies, lips––that all suggest the category of the feminine. There are slippages between those different forms; they begin to morph into one another. Flores’s paintings are full of repeated shapes. Actions echo and pulse, and forms are almost but not quite perfectly mirrored, evolving subtly across the picture plane. The iconographic choices feel ubiquitous, conventional, and readily available to anyone who wants to make an image. Because those images are so saturated in our culture, it feels like when someone uses them, they aren’t necessarily making art. Could they be meaningful if they are so heavily repeated?

Flores chooses to belabor those forms. They allow them to repeat and echo one another until they start getting fleshed out into something that can make meaning. In El Viento Piensa—Mis pétalos son alas, sol de rayos, estrella del día, Kiki kiss (The Wind Thinks––My Petals are Wings, Sun of Rays, Day Star, Kiki kiss) there is a moment where the flower feels like it’s misbehaving or taking on an animate persona: one of its petals reaches out and rather than being a soft, curved edge it becomes a sharp point that starts to morph into a talon. But the genre of still life or flower painting transforms even further in Flores’s series; the pollinators are a big part of these paintings. In contrast to the still life tradition where the bouquet of flowers is brought into the home or the studio, these images ask us to consider the lifecycle of the flower. We are invited to focus on the flower’s ability to reproduce itself, to keep living. We are encouraged to attend to that lifecycle and the pollinator’s integral role in it.

Flores’s painting process in the Kiki Works series hinges on a performative aspect: a channeling of Kiki, a queer, discoteca-frequenting, monarch butterfly.⁴Conversation between artist and authors, November 22, 2024. Whether or not the paintings record that particular performative process, these paintings summon a distinctive pulsing energy that their titles reinforce through rich descriptions and active verbs. The ubiquitous, feminine-associated icons that populate Flores’s paintings become animated, metamorphosing into agentive characters.

In Matt Morris’s series of drawings Auntiecedent (After Cathy Guisewite), a different type of feminine iconography is at stake. Morris takes up the feminine shapes and associations that were present in Cathy Guisewite’s comic strip images in Cathy (1976–2010) and exaggerates them. Hearts, flowers, and bows populate Guisewite’s original drawings; in many of the images, the Cathy character has a heart on her chest (e.g., No. 11), she is often pictured wearing teardrop or flower-petal-shaped earrings (e.g., No. 11, No. 17), and her mouth is easily transformed into a flower or bow shape (e.g., No. 16). When Guisewite began making these drawings, she was using this iconography in an unapologetic way.⁵ From the beginning, the Cathy character’s relationship to femininity was received in extreme measures. While some women found the character refreshingly resonant, others ridiculed the strip for the ways it reinforced feminine stereotypes. Regardless, if Cathy presented feminist possibilities, they were decidedly limited, only relevant to readers who were white, middle-class, educated women. See Susan E. Kirtley, “Crocodilites and Cathy: The Worst of Both Worlds,” in Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2021), 32–72. Morris seems to find kinship in that space of the unapologetic employment of feminine iconography. But they also find new layers of meaning through the process of copying, transforming, and intervening in that iconography.

While it is clear what is being referenced, the choices that Morris makes in terms of color, material, slight adjustments in form, and the process of excerpting certain panels all become crucial to the power of these images. The Auntiecedent drawings are built out of a range of pinks and purples inspired by the palettes of Rococo painters like Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.⁶ Conversation between artist and authors, December 20, 2024. They rely on the visibly powdery material quality of soft pastel on paper. They emphasize chaos: cloudlike forms and colors that smudge and bleed and blush.

In Auntiecedent (After Cathy Guisewite) No. 11, Cathy’s familiar feminine features become disembodied: her bow mouth becomes a gaping black maw with a drooping tongue and her perfectly curled eyelashes become an angry chevron. Morris applies the pastel thickly, and powdery pink marks scatter across the page. “If the IRS wants more money, let them try to scrape it off my face!!,” the text above reads. It offers an ambiguous critique––a message that is at once punky and self-interested, anti-governmental and pro-consumerist. Morris’s transformative choices provoke a visceral discomfort. They invite deeper reflection on Guisewite’s pithy and often dark writing, and they highlight the ways the category of femininity is at once recognizable and contingent. How it can be productively destabilized.

If Morris underscores the ways femininity might be at failure in the Cathy comic, Mari Eastman’s paintings present something quite different. Processes of copying are still in play, but Eastman’s source material in these paintings is fashion photography: images that might be categorized as “successful” displays of femininity. Her untitled painting from 2018 embodies what the artist has described as a type of “freshness”⁷ Mari Eastman, Open Practice Committee, No. 208, artist’s talk presented at the Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago, January 23, 2023.—a painted aesthetic that we understand to be a graceful elegance that is not labored. The opposite of the Cathy comic. The material choices (oil paint on yupo) emphasize that aesthetic: the appearance of fast application, sketchiness, and a visible record of the brushstrokes. As one dwells on the painting, however, the labor starts to become clearer. Eastman is luxuriating in the color red in this painting, but it’s not necessarily painted from what’s been lying around; she is planning for how the reds will interact, how they will play off of each other. But then she gives us this camouflage of an effortlessness around the painting.

While this “fresh” aesthetic exudes a type of confidence, there is also a deep vulnerability that comes through in Eastman’s paintings. This is especially visible in Why I Painted This (2018), where she inscribes her interest in the source image on the surface of the painting: “It’s the colour combo of this dress—plus how utterly happy she is—holding up her straw hat and smiling at it as if it were her baby.” It’s vulnerable to admit that one finds pleasure in the slick, commercial luxury of fashion magazines. It’s vulnerable to own up to the fact that one is persuaded or inspired by lifestyle advertising, especially to the extent that one feels motivated to recreate these already existing images. Vulnerability and the camouflage of effortlessness combine here to produce a different interrogation of femininity. 

The processes of copying, mirroring, and appropriating feminine-associated iconography drawn from mass culture offer a throughline between the practices of Flores, Morris, and Eastman. Putting their distinct approaches into dialogue deconstructs monolithic understandings of femininity and blurs the boundary between “original” and “derivative.”

Restless Adornment

“Girl stuff” also plumbs the limits of the categories of art and craft—limits that have a deep-seated relationship to gender. Artists like Allison Wade, Cydney M. Lewis, Sarabeth Dunton, and Liz McCarthy don’t necessarily take up craft-based practices, but employ types of making that feel adjacent to craft. Their artistic practices involve forms of material manipulation that are intricate, meticulous, sometimes labor-intensive, sometimes repetitive, sometimes bordering on obsessive. Historically, these qualities have been used to draw distinctions between art and craft; rote, repetitious, detail-oriented processes of making were deemed “cosmetic” as opposed to substantive.⁸See Elissa Auther’s discussion of these judgments in “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg, Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 339–64. But in these artists’ works, craft-adjacent practices are taken up as investigative strategies. Their works simultaneously take pleasure in and critically examine the decorative. Rather than remaining a surface-level effect, the act of adorning gains substance and depth. It gains a body.

In Allison Wade’s sculptural practice, welded metal frames are complemented by elements that move towards adornment. Her work raises tensions between permanent and contingent processes of making and the ways those processes and the materials that they rely on (materials that Wade meticulously lists in her artwork descriptions) are gendered. At the same time, her sculptures raise tensions between differing modes of abstraction and their similarly gendered nature. Formalist abstraction is put into direct dialogue with the decorative, unveiling the ways ornament and pattern are always moving towards abstraction. In Framework for offerings, variation 1 (2024) a welded steel armature is adorned with a soft tassel made of wrapped yarn and colored bright pink and ochre-gold. The incongruity between these materials and forms is almost comical. It’s as if the sculpture is wearing a piece of jewelry.

Wade’s sculptures engage deeply with questions of space. The artist has described her interest in making work that takes up space in a way that is quiet or unobtrusive.⁹Conversation between artist and authors, September 27, 2024. Her sculptures define space through their activation and framing of the negative, while at the same time collapsing space for the viewer. In Untitled (Cosmic Fishing #1) (2021), the frontal view presents a kind of shape play; it suggests a dialogue between the elements that propose the voids are as important as––or even more important than?––the elements that occupy positive space. But when one moves from the frontal view to a side view, the whole thing collapses to a single plane. A line, a whisper.

Despite the tensions that the sculptures raise between the steel armatures and the more decorative elements (e.g., the tassel in Framework for offerings, the ball chain and perhaps even the purple and teal planes with their more organic forms in contrast to the rigid geometry of the armatures in Cosmic Fishing) those adornments are active participants in the process of framing space. Even the tassel encircles a keyhole of space, highlighting it in bright pink. Adornment, then, in Wade’s work is not an afterthought or a final touch, but an active player in the formal experiments in which her sculptures engage.

Similarly, in the assemblages of Cydney M. Lewis, adornment is an agent. Lewis combines glossy images of patterns, jewelry, and rhinestone-studded objects with their literal counterparts—pearlescent fabrics and actually applied rhinestones, metal studs, and found objects. In Rising of the Djinn (2024), slippages like those between the draped form of a beaded, blue necklace and a cut-out image of strings of lustrous blue beads challenge the viewer to look more thoroughly. At first glance, the images and objects the artist employs are easy to lump together. One has to focus on them—their surfaces, their forms, their materialities––in order to understand how they have been assembled. It’s a type of looking that reinforces the sense of pleasure that is conjured by the materials that Lewis combines. It’s a playful type of looking.

Lewis’s assemblages are about imagination. The images and conventions that make up her compositions transform into something new. The elements are not stagnant; they are in motion. They respond to gravity and defy it, they move between the tangible and the intangible, and they transcend the sources they stemmed from. For the artist, Rising of the Djinn is about “acknowledging the ‘in-between space’” and allowing that space to have its own unique power.¹⁰Cydney M. Lewis, artist statement on Rising of the Djinn, email communication to authors, Nov. 18, 2024.

Lewis combines glossy and glittering materials in a way that complicates the female figure. Her incorporation of fragments of the human form––especially the Black female form––that sometimes involve unsettling scale shifts could move towards the monstrous or violent in the Surrealist vein. But instead, her fragmented figures become part of this play of pleasure and imagination. For the artist, “recycling, cutting, piecing, reconstructing, and collaging” is a means of “contributing to futurisms’ speculative terrains.”¹¹Cydney M. Lewis, artist statement on series Terrain Vague, https://www.cydneylewis.com/work/exodus-movement-of-people. In this respect, Lewis’s engagement with pleasure and imagination can be situated within dialogues around Afrofuturism in the twenty-first century and its aims to “interpret, engage, design, or alter reality for the re-imagination of the past, the contested present, and as a catalyst for the future,” as scholar and theorist Reynaldo Anderson has written. Reynaldo Anderson, “Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto,” in “Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts,” special issue, Obsidian 42, no. 1-2 (2016): 231. There is an evening out of forms; the human form is no longer hierarchically privileged and everything becomes interchangeable. But this doesn’t mean that the human form is degraded. By putting fragmented elements of human figures in juxtaposition with these images and objects of adornment and treating them all equally, the adornments themselves transform. They are no longer worn or overlaid. They are not empty, waiting to be filled. Rather, they become their own substance. They are the figure.

Sarabeth Dunton, too, takes inspiration from found photographic materials, transforming those materials not through collage, but through material manipulation and translation into drawing. Those transformative processes allow her to not only reimagine the found content, but also to reimagine the type of gaze the image invites.

In her drawing Chorus Line (2024), adornment is operating on two different levels. First, there is the surface of the drawing. A repetitious pattern that fills the whole page moves towards an almost excessive making process. Everything isn’t perfectly replicated but there is a belaboring of the surface. Second, there is the subject matter. Fishnet stockings, red nail polish, and shiny, pointy-toed, high-heeled shoes are still somewhat identifiably being depicted. These are objects that take inspiration from the eponymous chorus line and speak to sexualized tropes of femininity. Starting by distorting and manipulating the original source image with the use of a flatbed scanner, and then translating that manipulated image into a handmade drawing, Dunton’s approach might be compared with techniques of Surrealist automatism.¹²Conversation between artist and authors, November 22, 2024. Surrealists took up image making practices that sought to tap into the unconscious, removing the author’s privileged position in composing. Here, Dunton’s own process similarly seems to relinquish control over the image, giving agency to the viewer.

The repeated imagery is totally fragmented from the body, but there is still something sexy about Chorus Line. There are different types of enjoyment that the drawing seems to record and explore. For Dunton, drawing is a space of pleasure and play; it’s a way to spend time with oneself.¹³Conversation between artist and authors. There is a sensuousness to the materials—the luster of the graphite, the lusciousness of the black ink—that helps to make that pleasure visible. But there is also a different type of investigation of the sexualized tropes from which the image-making began. Dunton has described her interest in examining what it means to be a queer woman who has been conditioned by the male gaze.¹⁴Conversation between artist and authors. In her faceted exploration of adornment, she complicates that gaze. She doesn’t reject the images and objects that have been designed to appeal to the male gaze, nor does she necessarily propose some clear alternative. Rather, she records the pleasure she finds in looking and in making and invites viewers to find a similar sort of pleasure amid the rhythmic organic shapes and lines. Through an investigation of adornment, she creates an image that provokes a gaze that is not objectifying or voyeuristic but is nevertheless sensual.

In contrast, the adornments that Liz McCarthy applies to her/their sculptures appear to operate cosmetically. In her series of baby sculptures, fragments of clothing and personal keepsakes are adhered to the glazed ceramic surfaces with epoxy putty after the form is fully sculpted and fired. In the most literal fashion, they are surface effects. But in practice, those acts of adorning are crucial to how these sculptures communicate.

McCarthy’s babies are uncanny. They speak in the language of the babydoll—a language that feels especially taboo in the realm of art. But their surfaces (unromantic, overworked, almost clumsy), their scale (unwieldy, almost monstrously large), and their functional quality (hollow vessels that can be played as a whistle) push the sculptures away from the cute or the quaint and towards the grotesque.¹⁵For a theorization of cuteness and its relationship to the uncanny, see Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), especially 91–92. The addition of adornments reel these strange figures back into the realm of the babydoll and the ideas of play and imagination that the doll might suggest. Ubermensch Baby (2024) and 1987 Femme Frill Baby (2024) are dressed up, though only partially so. The worked surface of the clay and the whistle orifices remain visible between the fragments of applied clothing. Here, adorning serves to highlight the ways gender is socially constituted. Especially in combination with the babies’ uncanniness, gendered tropes are revealed to be deeply disquieting.

Even as the highly gendered associations of the embellishments on Ubermensch and Femme Frill feel hard to ignore, in McCarthy’s sculptures, the associations between specific images and objects are made malleable. In Memory Ware Baby (2024), the artist’s own personal keepsakes adorn the ceramic figure. Charms and trinkets and souvenirs from years past are affixed to the stoneware surface of the baby in the style of the folk tradition known as “memory ware.”¹⁶ The term “memory ware,” also called “memory jugs,” refers to objects that have been coated with an adhesive layer (most often putty) and then adorned with small objects. Folk art scholars have associated the practice especially with the African American community. Brooke Davis Anderson, “Jugs, Memory,” in Encyclopedia of American Folk Art, ed. Gerard C. Wertkin (New York: Routledge, 2004), 314. Without explanation, the particular sentimental value of each of those keepsakes is lost to the viewer. Memory Ware Baby puts personal or idiosyncratic meaning-making front and center. But the same can be said of the other two sculptures: the clothing that adorns Ubermensch and Femme Frill similarly speak to the artist’s own past.¹⁷ Conversation between artist and authors, September 11, 2024. While the embellishments sit quite literally on the surface of McCarthy’s ceramic sculptures, the act of adorning is revealed to be a process that can imbue objects with meaning that is multifarious and mutable. 

In different ways, the practices of Wade, Lewis, Dunton, and McCarthy suggest a willingness to take up feminine tropes in order to reimagine them. No longer superficial, adornment is made active, substantive, transformative, and critical.

Representations of introspection and intimate exchange

“Girl stuff” deals with representations of selves and experiences that have been treated as secretive or unfashionable: journaling, scrapbooking, confessional forms of writing and image-making that have been deemed too vulnerable to be taken seriously—too vulnerable to be comfortably consumed.¹⁸ For a study of the ways vulnerability results in discomfort and dismissal see Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Artists like Jazmine., Selina Trepp, and Cecilia Beaven interrogate such vulnerable modes of representation and self-representation. Their practices fold together memory, imagination, and the unconscious and combine records of introspective processes with reflections on intimate exchanges that are often overlooked. They resist views that objectify bodies or ossify identities and instead embrace contingent, curious, and complex understandings of selves.

In Jazmine.’s photographic practice, she combines lived memories with ones that are invented or imagined. Mining found archival photographs from Chicago’s South Side (where the artist herself grew up), she collages those images with her own studio photographs, handwritten annotations, and handmade interventions to create images that invite the viewer into an intimate exchange.

In Untitled Scrapbook (2020), a well-loved yellow sticky note lists a series of “Affirmations” in the first person, some of which are highlighted. The list is especially intimate. These sorts of personal mantras––uplifting statements one tells oneself to shift one’s perspective and positively transform one’s thinking––aren’t typically shared. The vulnerability of the affirmations set into motion a string of suggested intimacies: a found photograph of two young girls in a living room, posing or dancing (one thrusts her hip out, one throws her head back, her low-heeled shoe slipping off one of her feet); two black and white photographs taken by Jazmine. that emphasize touch (grasping hands, leaning heads; in each case, two figures embracing). The intimacies that these phrases and images propose are echoed in the haptic qualities of the lush, color print. Glossy photos, matte newsprint, crinkly cellophane, paperclips and masking tape and the slightly wrinkled and peeling bottom corner of the sticky note––they all provoke a sense of touch and proximity for the viewer.

The almost trompe l’oeil effect of Untitled, Scrapbook shifts in I remember. Do you? (2023) which incorporates literal collaged elements. A black and white image from a contact sheet is taped atop a found archival polaroid that Jazmine. embellished with tiny, embroidered roses. In combination with the handwritten text she adds to the bottom of the polaroid (“I remember this day…do you??? We double dutched, we bbq in the park, we watched the sunset”), the embroidered embellishment transforms the image. The photographed encounter between two girls slides into the artist’s own nostalgic personal reflection (whether real or imagined) on friendships between girls, and perhaps the viewer even feels implicated (“…do you???”). Jazmine.’s photographs complicate the limits of subjecthood, suggesting the ways our identities might depend on imagined intimate exchanges as much as they do on lived, remembered ones.

Contingency and questions of identity formation that hinge on intimate exchanges—especially those within and between women—are also in play in Selina Trepp’s photographs from Ladies Room (2015–16). But in contrast to Jazmine.’s excavation of the relationship between lived and imagined memory, Trepp’s photos explore tensions between public and private space through her investigation of a women’s bathroom at a nightclub. Trepp’s images point to the ways that emotional or affective life seeps beyond the confines of the private realm—how it “slops over” into public space and public experiences.¹⁹ Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 560.

The images from this series incorporate the artist’s own body, shown in fragmented views caught in mirrored reflections as she snaps the photographs.²⁰ Conversation between artist and authors, August 1, 2024. In Here I am. Here we are. (2016), the crumbling concrete floor, paint-smudged studio wall, and wooden beam that serves as a palimpsest of past projects combine with the artist’s presence to underscore the ephemeral nature of the image. It represents a certain stage or moment that is captured by the camera and whose only afterlife is the photograph. That ephemerality is especially resonant with the theme of Ladies Room, invoking the fleeting encounters one might have in a public bathroom: one’s eyes meeting someone’s in the mirror as one washes one’s hands or reapplies one’s makeup; someone asking one for a tampon; the partial view you might catch in the gaps beneath bathroom stall doors or the sliver of space between stalls. The public bathroom is a liminal space—a place you move through rather than lingering in. It’s also a space that has been gendered, creating boundaries and behavioral habits that can be harmfully exclusionary. But the bathroom is a space that might be more private than the rest of the nightclub and thus, emotional outpourings or introspective behavior might need to happen there. You can kind of lose it in the bathroom. In the public bathroom you look at yourself, but you also might look at everyone else. In other words, moments of introspection overlap with not only attention to bodily realities, but also fleeting yet intimate encounters: sidelong looks and exchanged glances. Trepp’s photographs dwell on those glances, inciting reflection on whether an embrace of the glance might not disrupt or reconfigure the hegemonic power of the gaze.

Cecilia Beaven’s stills from Here’s Your Head (2017) engage quite differently with ephemerality and contingency. Part of a set of drawings created for her one-minute animated loop, these images flit by in their final form amid a dream sequence where we see an array of body parts that are probing and prodding. But lingering on these drawings underscores the ways Beaven dismantles the typical nude. Her images describe fantastical experiences that stem from the unconscious. Composed of bold, unhesitating lines and––in service of creating a handcrafted animation––elements that repeat again and again, transforming only subtly, the drawings insist on the validity of those experiences.

In Beaven’s images, body parts become almost pattern-like. Rather than a specific event or an encounter between two specific people, they suggest a collage of different experiences or memories of touch. The fragmentation of those body parts as well as their semi-abstraction—the minimal, cartoon-like shorthand they’re composed of––refract an objectifying or voyeuristic gaze. Instead, they suggest curiosity, self-exploration, and discovery. These scenes seem to offer a representation of sex that runs against the grain of common popular media portrayals. The drawings capture not just the beginning and the end, but the in-between of sex. There is dripping and oozing and wetness, but it is a sequence that is not necessarily about a specific climax. Body parts start to blur; there seem to be more similarities than differences between those parts, whether identifiably male, female, or non-sexed.

In the animation, the artist narrates the sequence in a voice over. She says, “In the dream, I’m someone else; half you and half me, but a monster without a head, but with two penises.”²¹ Cecilia Beaven, Here’s Your Head (Toma tu cabeza, 2017), animation, 1 minute loop. In the context of the animation, then, we can understand these drawings as part of an imagining of bodies made strange—even monstrous—but nevertheless curious about pleasure. Bridging Beaven’s interests in the mythological and the introspective, these images sidestep standard modes of representation and self-representation by bringing an imaginative, unconscious realm into focus.²² Cecilia Beaven, artist’s statement, http://www.ceciliabeaven.com/biostatement.

In the practices of Jazmine., Trepp, and Beaven, diverse strategies for representing selves weave together. Intimate glimpses of bodies, first-person perspectives, and vulnerable revelations of inner monologues and subconscious thoughts refuse to cohere into static likenesses of individuals, creating space for complex and evolving understandings of identity.

The Potentialities of “Girl Stuff”

The artworks gathered in put a bow on it. and discussed here are not an exhaustive description of “girl stuff,” but meant to open up conversations around what this category can be and can do. We hope viewers find other, productive resonances between the works that the exhibition presents. Grappling with the elements in these works that might feel especially feminine-associated (“girl”) or especially easy to dismiss as trivial or popular (“stuff”) reveals the power that those elements have. Beneath its unserious veneer, “girl stuff” can sneak in serious content. It can subvert and disrupt patriarchal systems and other forms of dominant culture. It can spark dialogue about the way that gendered, sexed, and racialized tropes have been forged and perpetuated. But in addition to its capacity to critique, “girl stuff” is also generative. It can create liberated spaces for personal and political conversations and it can mobilize gestures of play and fantasy to imagine alternatives to our current world. In 2025, it feels especially urgent that we find new modes for resisting racist, sexist, and exclusionary ideologies. We propose “girl stuff” as one such mode: a ribbon, tied into a bow, that can serve as a fuse to set off explosive dialogues and actions.

Find more documentation of put a bow on it. here.