When I moved to Kentucky in late 2024, I began making the five hour drive to Chicago and was struck by the HELL IS REAL billboard on I65 in northwest Indiana. It makes me laugh but it also makes me angry and a bit panicked. I know little about the origins of this particular billboard, but in a country that’s becoming increasingly white Christian nationalist, public messages like this that once felt safely kitsch can now instigate a mini spiral. Our leaders want to strip away our autonomy and life force to cosplay an inaccurate and coercive interpretation of the bible, and it literally makes me nauseous. Still, when I drive past the sign I also think Ha! Hell is already here–we’ve been living in it–and we’re doing everything to survive. They think hell is a compelling threat, but it’s really just the limp fantasy of those who lack vision for a politically liberated future, and likely the pleasure of a sexually liberated present.
A main feature of living in hell is watching. I watch ICE disappear and murder people in American cities. I watch AI cat videos. I watch the US and Israel commit wars crimes and genocide overseas. I watch actual cat videos. I watch politicians demonize trans people and take away their IDs. I watch reviews of the best balenciaga le cajole handbag dupes. I watch private equity gobble up housing, education, and childcare. I watch hot takes from people watching what I’m watching, or watching other people who are watching what I’m watching.
As I wallowed in this watching, I began to paint scrolls and amphitheaters and laptops and clouds; reveling in the muddling of these somewhat flat icons and cartoon stand-ins for (and combinations of) “information,” “news,” “audience (or watchers),” “hole (or hell),” and “spectacle”-->”news hole,” “spectacle hell.” As an artist with roots in drawing and cartooning, this flavor of lexicon(ing) grounds me, and becomes a vehicle for transcending the original problem or agitation.
In the painting Flaming download a sky and cloud-covered scroll wraps a giant laptop surrounded by golden flames. Painted in the middle of the scroll is a giant purse with fuchsia lining. Inside the purse is a big flat candle, surrounded by fuchsia-tipped stars. The pattern on the purse mirrors the golden flames surrounding the laptop.
When I made this painting I wanted a new purse, and was feverishly toggling between eBay tabs and news tabs. I wanted the soft comfort of carrying my stuff in something pretty, instead of the ratty tote bags I usually use—to feel cuter in hell. I guess an alternate and more dramatic title could be The Revelation and Ecstasy of Femme Sorrow.
This new, more narrative, work builds on previous projects that contended with the Romantic landscape genre’s complicity in US nation building, attempting to encounter and create a more radical sublime in the midst of ongoing land theft, climate catastrophe, and rising fascism.
In the tapestry Daffodil power tower season, a red, tongue-like scroll emerges from a steep and bottomless amphitheater. The tongue-scroll is caged in a somewhat provisional and ornate tower, painted against a flat dark sky from which two giant daffodils emerge. Blocks of beaded and marbled silk, pieced velvet, and another, smaller, quilted amphitheater punctuate the central action.
The tapestry hangs from a wooden dowel and found-wood brackets, which are carved into sharp spears on all ends, the tip of each dipped in fuchsia (photo is pre-dip). Thank you to my husband Al for using their inventive woodworking skills to make these things for me, and also for making the birch panels, and also for being so kind and patient in the midst of my generalized hysteria disorder.
I started drawing and painting the central image in Daffodil power tower season after a meditation vision I had of a wiry, skeletal tower. This vision appeared during a time of hardship and transition, which led me into an investigation of the tower card. In tarot, the tower signifies foundational, often chaotic or devastating change and upheaval. This piece is devotional; a painted and stitched and decorated commitment to both love through and speak through the contemporary tower season that so many of us are feeling bound by, both privately and collectively.
The word fuchsia as a stand-in for future comes from a Gertrude Stein poem in her 1934 book Portraits & Prayers. The lines go:
As it was. As it is. It is as it is. It is and as it is and as it is. And so and so as it was. Keep it in sight alright. Not to the future but to the fuchsia.
I first read these words as a queer negation of normative definitions of future and progress, in favor of a stranger, more magical utopian ideal. Unfortunately, Gertrude Stein’s politics are super disappointing. Despite being Jewish and queer, she not only supported Franco but also collaborated with the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France. She even referred to Hitler as “not the dangerous one” but “the German romanticist.”
From this disappointment and disgust, I’m plucking Stein’s fuchsia and designating it as a shorthand for a Muñozian queer futurity:
Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.
—José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Another thing I like about the word fuchsia, which I think aids this designation, is the indeterminacy and mutability of the color itself. Perhaps its ever-changing nature is found in the wide variation of its two-toned namesake flower, with colors ranging from purple to pink to red. Fuchsia the color was born when French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin invented fuchsine dye, which was quickly renamed “Magenta” after a French victory at the Battle of Magenta in Italy in 1859. Did this nationalist imposition inspire the color’s wily slippage between magenta, fuchsia, purple, and pink? Are all of these colors sub-colors of fuchsia? Or is fuchsia itself an elusive sub-color of purple? Or pink? To further confuse the hierarchy, search the word fuchsia to see hundreds of color swatches pop up. Some of these fuchsias appear in the paintings.
Another one of my fellow queer Jewish women obsessions/ disappointments is Bari Weiss. Recently appointed by super-heir David Ellison to lead CBS News, the blatantly Islamophobic Bari Weiss cut her teeth harassing Muslim and Palestinian professors as an undergrad at Columbia, before founding her Silicon Valley-billionaire-funded Substack, The Free Press. In her first months at CBS, she hosted a town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, who has taken over as CEO of his fascist Christian youth organization Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk once described her as more extreme than him.
Some of the paintings in this show are made from screenshots of audience members watching as Weiss asks Kirk pointless questions and audience members ask Kirk vetted questions, and nobody challenges her whatsoever. Kirk herself is fascinating to watch, seething and off kilter with eyes that narrow and widen abruptly. She spouts what I think are religious idioms (some biblical, some pop-Christian—if that’s a thing?) and is met with applause. The slightly bored faces of most of the audience are punctuated by a few people with their eyes upturned, likely towards a screen, but the immediate reference for me was the rapture depicted in so many religious paintings from antiquity and onwards. Later, as I kept painting, I thought of the glassy eyes of the white mob in the horrible 1930 photograph taken after their lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana (the same photo that inspired Abel Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit,” sung with the utmost gut wrenching feeling by Billie Holliday). And then of course the 1941 Weegee photograph “Their First Murder.”
I made these paintings while listening to the town hall audio, several times over. The pieces are not so much caricatures of the audience, as they are a slow stewing negation of Kirk, Weiss, and the devastating forces behind them: the Ellison empire’s takeover of American media and the (highly funded) normalization of white Christian nationalism in the mainstream. The practice of listening to this spectacle and painting those who are watching also becomes a meditation on my own subject position as an audience member in hell, as well as my discomforting proximity to these strange millennial figureheads.
My work is in a transitional place right now. Actually, my work is always in a transitional place, because I work in years-long iterative spirals of inquiry and digestion that never resolve. For a long time, all I wanted to do was spend hours and hours sewing these weird composite substrates, and then respond to them. Now I desire the immediacy of a ready-surface, I think because I’m feeling such a strong pull towards certain images, particularly faces.
Sometimes this can be uncomfortable, as I struggle to see the limits of what seemingly disparate things can be pushed up against each other. Practicing this pushing feels right in a time of such incongruous and devastating proximities. Still, as I gain more clarity around the limits of art making in affecting structural, material change, I’m struck by the potential that this knowledge opens up for going completely elsewhere in my work; like away from earth. More so, I am struck by the mandate this knowledge brings to spend more time on structural, material change.
A fuchsia brighter than hell runs through 4/25 at Sheet Cake Gallery in Memphis, TN. Individual works and installation shots are viewable here.