"Bad Girls" through December 8, 2024
OCDChinatown | 75 East Broadway Mall, 2nd Floor
Sharp, glimmering pins pierce the corners of Fern Cerezo’s two self-portraits in OCDChinatown's group show “Bad Girls,” which has been lovingly assembled by Devan Díaz for her curatorial debut. The pair of commanding images join photographic works by five other artists, mounted on the walls around a high-heel shoe sculpture by Jessica Mitrani at the gallery’s center (a glossy black platform, glitched out to ankle-breaking height and displayed on a Lucite plinth). “That accident which pricks me” is how Roland Barthes describes the punctum, but the prick—that detail of stirring, intense unexplainable affect—in Cerezo’s work is no accident, it’s the stare: vulnerable, stubborn, fuck me, fuck you! The politics of rEPresEntAtIOn boiled into a look. A sense of mortality shadows this attitude as it does the thrillingly vulgar pink that Díaz has painted the space, an allusion to the house from Camila Sosa Villada’s novel, the 2019 trans bildungsroman Bad Girls, after which the show is named. Díaz chose an orange-pink shade like sunset that makes the black of the frames and the shoe go pop.
Díaz takes on two trending genres here—shows that take books as their premises, and those composed of Downtown glamor-portraits—managing to birth something in lockstep with the climate yet still all her own. Who the people are in these photos is as important as who the artists are to one another as it is how they make each other look and how that makes them feel. A shared language of beauty serves as the show’s connective tissue—many of the artists have worked on both sides of the camera.
