April 17 - May 23
Springs Projects, New York
Avery Z. Nelson
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz
Edie Fake
Ever Baldwin
Fran W.
Judy Giera
KC Crow Maddux
Keltie Ferris
Nic Koller
With a set by DJ Brattyboi, and a performance by Nic Koller
curated by Sarah Davidson and Vic Roth
checklist
photos: Andrew Schwartz
-Gordon Hall (“Why I Don’t Talk About ‘The Body’: A Polemic”, 2020)
No point in making myself comfortable. The abstraction, the dream, are as limited for me as the concrete and the real. What to do? Show a part of it only, in a narrow mirror, as if it were the whole? Mix up a halo with spatters? Refusing to bump into walls, bump into windows instead? In the black of night. Until I see everything clearly, I want to hunt myself down, struggle with myself.
-Claude Cahun (Disavowals, 1930)
While No Point in Making Myself Comfortable encompasses approaches which all relate to “the body”, as curators, we were inspired by artist Gordon Hall's rejection of the term 'the body' as a universal signifier in favour of more specific explorations of embodiment. Claude Cahun's use of her own body as a gender-bending medium in the first half of the XXth century was a spiritual touchstone in juxtaposing these artists, whose varied approaches to figuration via abstract gestures tease the limits of the term “queer abstraction”. Rather than claim to reflect a universal experience of embodiment, the works in this exhibition reflect on idiosyncratic themes – from childhood to desert scarcity – via approaches as varied as biomorphism, self-portraiture, diagrammatic flatness, cartoon figuration, and intuitive dreamscape.
In works by Keltie Ferris, KC Crow Maddux, and Nic Koller, mediated impressions of the artists’ own bodies play a central role. In Ferris’ work, the artist wields his clothed body as a painting tool for its own recording. Indexed onto the surface of the canvas, the body print reveals a ghostly presence that simultaneously emerges and submerges, mediated by paint. In Maddux’s sculptural pieces, the photographic image is fragmented and recombined, suggesting a modular, assembled version of the self. Rigid shapes turn into pointing limbs that refer back to the abjectness of the subject with semiotic wit and humor. Koller’s paintings, based on low-fi multiple exposure photos, both capture and refract the artist in a flash. Scumbled pastel grazes the grain of the canvas in an attempt to describe the body’s apparition, only to let it hover, mannequin-like, in its own glitchy haze.
In Catalina Schliebener Muñoz’s world, bodily abstraction becomes an environment: their room-sized installation occupies the interior chamber of the exhibition like a pulsing lung. Cartoon gestures upend familiar tropes of children’s stories, and the over-layed spilling out of imagery and soft sculpture becomes both funny and discomforting. Judy Giera also plays with ideas of environment: her functional light installation invites a hang-out, presenting the female form as a supplier of endless comfort and energy (she’ll charge your phone!). The monumental, foreboding fixture is both tactile and grotesque, a theatrical wink towards Peewee’s playhouse.
In Fran W.’s cerebral yet dreamy paintings, theatrical object-ness is more metaphysical. W's avatar-like “girl” disrupts self-serious painting styles of the last hundred years, confusing scale relationships to play with the various connotations of “doll”. It’s often unclear if “the girl” is a full-sized human or a toy. In turn, Edie Fake’s disco-inflected paintings diagram the artists’ relationship to the desert environment. In them, desert and body systems conjoin to offer an ecstatic arena where scarcity and queer utopia can coexist – like Downpour Uproar, where landscape and suggestive bodily metaphor intertwine.
Avery Z. Nelson’s paintings are also born of embodied sensation, offering a fluid and color-driven experience where bodily description barely coalesces. Instead, discreet moments reveal themselves quietly, like the sketched outline of a hand tenderly opening a suggestive fold. Ever Baldwin’s intuitive work also reflects their experience of living in a body, but the insect-like, biomorphic paintings take on a mysterious life of their own. With bulbous wooden frames, Baldwin’s paintings question the boundaries of bodily-ness contained within the embedded canvas, suggesting pulsating organisms borne of correlated parts.
-Sarah Davidson and Vic Roth
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Avery Z. Nelson (they) was born in Rhinebeck, NY and lives and works in NYC. Nelson’s vibrant and sensual paintings record the inner experience of a trans self beyond constructs of gender, remapping the body’s erogenous zones in ever-shifting ways. Grounded in gesture, rhythm, and dance, Nelson generates friction between movement and stillness, figure and landscape, to erupt and destabilize categories within poetic compositions.
Nelson has presented solo shows most recently at Chozick Family Gallery (NYC), Blade Study Gallery (NYC), Rachel Uffner Gallery (NYC), and Prats Nogueras Blanchard (Barcelona). Nelson's work has been included in group exhibitions at many spaces including DS Galerie (Paris), Para Site (Hong Kong) and the DePaul Art Museum (Chicago). Their work has been reviewed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Artspace, and Spike Magazine. In 2019 Nelson received a Sharpe Walentas Studio Fellowship, and in 2021 they were a recipient of an FST Studio Funding Grant.
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Catalina Schliebener Muñoz (they/them) (b. Santiago, Chile, 1980), is a Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist and educator living in Brooklyn, who works primarily with collage, installation, and murals. Their work draws on images, objects, and narratives associated with childhood and explores gender, sexuality, and class. They earned a Bachelor of Philosophy (2008) and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (2005) from the Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales (ARCIS; Santiago, Chile).
Schliebener Muñoz’s work has been exhibited internationally including solo shows at Olympia, New York, NYC (2025), Queens Museum, Queens, NYC (2024), Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA (2024), Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, New York, NYC (2022, 2016), Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA (2021), HACHE Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017), Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (2016), CCMATTA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015), Fundación Esteban Lisa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2014), CCE-Centro Cultural de España, Santiago, Chile (2011), Galería Bech, Santiago, Chile (2006), among others. Schliebener Muñoz is a recipient of the following grants: FONDART Grants – Cultural and Arts Development Fund of the Government of Chile (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), DIRAC – Board of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Chile (2007), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Emergency Grant (2021, 2024) and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Research Grant (2025) among others. They also received a Queer Artist Fellowship from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2017), and an Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Fellowship from the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018). Schliebener Muñoz was an In Situ Fellow (2022-2024) at Queens Museum, Queens, NY.
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Plotted out beforehand using graphite pencil, rulers and protractors, and hand-painted with the illusion of hard-edged precision, Edie Fake’s artistic practice mines the grammar of architecture to carve out space for bodies that have been othered and invalidated by dominant systems of knowledge. Fake’s abstract representations of community form and collapse, cohere and dissipate, reflective of the real experience within queer lives and their ever-shifting constellations, while centering his central concern for the audacity of queer utopian imagining.
Since moving from first Chicago, then to Los Angeles while briefly attending grad school at USC, to the high desert of Joshua Tree in California, and currently Vancouver, BC, Fake’s work has evolved from his acclaimed Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — to a new feeling of vulnerability due to shifts in the U.S. social and political climate. The work blurs lines between architecture and body with structures adorned by elements that seem to be both decorative and protective. Architectural components are used as visual metaphors for the ways in which definition and validation elude trans identities. Says Fake, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.”
Edie Fake’s (b. 1980, Evanston, IL) multi-media work — drawings, paintings, installations, comics, books and zines — has been exhibited in solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; and in New York City at The Drawing Center, Broadway Gallery and Marlborough Gallery. His 2018 show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in Art in America. Fake’s work is held in the collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; RISD Museum, Providence; KADIST, San Francisco; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his Gaylord Phoenix collection of comics won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His work has been written about and featured in artforum, New York Times, The Paris Review, Art News, Art 21, Juxtapoz, Hyperallergic, The Comics Journal, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980 and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York, and he currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada
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Ever Baldwin creates abstracted paintings with sculpted, wooden frames that extend the composition from canvas to frame. Baldwin lives and works in Catskill, NY. They hold a BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Recent solo exhibitions include Marinaro, New York; The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME; LeFebvre et Fils, Paris; Emma Gray HQ, Los Angeles, CA; and JAG Projects, Hudson, NY. Their work has been included in groups shows at Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA; Modern Art, London; and Art Omi, Ghent, NY among others.
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Franella Marceline W. (b. 1996, Châteauguay, CA) is a painter based in Montréal. In Franella’s work, figures emerge from a world of geometric abstraction, taking the form of ethereal girls and women. Transgender visual puns; eggs, fish, and dolls situate the scene in the middle-space between words and images. Dresses, boots, blouses, skirts, fishnets, graffiti, and urban decay erupt from the surface like a sore: raw queer desire dissolves the ambiguous geometry of colourful interior spaces in a kaleidoscopic cum-stain of lowbrow maximalism. Fran has presented a solo exhibition at Franz Kaka gallery in Toronto, realised a two person exhibition at Espace Maurice in Montréal, and has held a solo exhibition in an off-site context in Montréal curated by Alexa Hawksworth
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Judy Giera is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist and arts worker. She has presented solo exhibitions with the NARS Foundation, haul gallery, Waterloo Arts Center, and SPANTZO. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at High Noon Gallery, The Hudson River Museum, The Painting Center, Bronx Arts Space, Trestle Gallery, Gallery Aferro, among others. Judy was a 2022 AIM Fellow with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and her work was included in Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial at the museum in 2024. Giera was awarded the Davyd Whaley Scholarship at the Art Students League of New York and has participated in residency programs with SVA, NYC Crit Club/Plum Line Residency, The Potato Farm Project/EFA North Fork, and ChaShaMa/Cha North. Judy holds an MFA in Art from Lehman College (CUNY) and an MFA in Theatre from Pace University. In addition to her art practice, Judy is the Associate Director of Collections for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, overseeing the museum’s collection of over 30,000 queer art objects. She resides in Brooklyn with her wife, two cats, and a large collection of houseplants.
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KC Crow Maddux is a Brooklyn-based trans artist whose work is intentionally difficult to categorize. Their work uses flat, graphic, code-switching language to reference the body, architecture, language, and signage. Using deceptively simple forms, the work evades simple reading due to its complex representational dynamics. Maddux has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Fire Island Artist Residency, and Lighthouse Works. Their work has appeared in and been written about by ArtForum, Forbes, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and others. Their work has shown at A.I.R. Gallery, the Renaissance Society, Tala, High Noon, Turley, and the Leslie Lohman GLBT Museum. Maddux has an upcoming solo at High Noon Gallery in the fall.
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Keltie Ferris’ compositions channel the catalytic potential of medium and physical technique into expressions of physicality, energy, and change. His works thrum with vibrant color and a diverse deployment of pictorial forms and textures. Hand-painted pattern fields, bursts of spray paint and oil pastel, raised outlines, and pixelated backgrounds nod to a wide range of visual lineages, including natural motifs, ancient craftwork, Abstract Expressionism, contemporary digital images. In his large-scale paintings, thick areas of medium are built up, then alternately swiped, blurred, and removed with a variety of tools. By deconstructing his own process of painting into its most fundamental actions and materials, Ferris offers an expansive vision of abstraction as a site of formal experimentation and conceptual ingenuity.
This keen articulation of materiality is further evinced by an ongoing series of body prints, which transform painting into a personal index. Using natural oils and pigments, Ferris wields his own body as a brush and imprints its form onto the canvas or paper surface. The artist thus becomes both process and material, action and image—a presence conveyed through each imprinted mark, reifying the relationship between Ferris’s self and the work of art.
Keltie Ferris (b. 1977, Louisville, Kentucky) received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2004 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. His work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2023, 2021); Morán Morán, Mexico City (2023), Los Angeles, California (2019); Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (2018).
His work is included in the public collections of the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee; the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas; and the Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, Kentucky, among others.
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Nic Koller is a visual artist, filmmaker, composer, performer and poet whose works span drawing, painting, animation, experimental film, multimedia installations, soundscapes and spoken word albums. While Nic’s interdisciplinary work has been shown in Sundance Film Festival's "New Frontier" Program, the New Yorker's "Daily Shouts" and in film festivals worldwide, including Tribeca Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and Annecy International Animation Festival, they primarily perform and show work locally in New York City. Nic's oeuvre mixes collage, technology and personal vulnerability and often integrates digital and analog processes, bringing modern technologies in collaboration with traditional art materials.