Installation view of Deviation
Deviations at the James Fuentes Gallery highlights queer and trans artists.
Walk into the group show Deviations at James Fuentes Gallery in Tribeca and the first work you encounter is Daffodil in a Cup, a painting by Nash Glynn, hung just outside the main gallery. Deceptively simple, it depicts the titular flower in a glass of water, its submerged stem refracted. Glynn’s still life operates as a prelude to the show’s concerns: bodies and forms that bend, distort, and shift—like light through liquid.
Curated by artist Oscar Yi Hou, Deviations is bound not just by theme, but by what hannah baer (in the show’s accompanying text) calls a “web of sociality.” These are artists who share a common space be it in nightlife, social circles, or the “downtown scene” in general. Their works speak to one another as if across a hall of mirrors. Filtered through the intricate dynamics of a friend group, you’ll see a wrestling with self image, reflection, and perception. There’s a sense of mutual recognition and the occasional warping of it, making it aesthetic and social material for the artists. The show feeds off this tension: between depiction and distortion, solidarity and the singular.
Yi Hou’s own contribution is a portrait of Emilio Tamez, who in turn presents a photograph titled SURRENDER on the opposite wall. Doron Langberg has a painting of Glynn in the show, and Glynn’s second piece, in turn, is a self-portrait. Juliana Huxtable and Martine Gutierrez contribute works of fantastical auto-portraiture. James Bantone’s steel collages fragment a man’s face into metallic shards, literalizing the idea of visual distortion. Two photographs by Sam Penn depict their subjects head-on, returning the viewer’s gaze with quiet intensity. This charged looking, at oneself, at others, and at being seen, sits at the core of Deviations. What does it mean to represent the self? And how does that image diverge from how one is perceived?
Pe Ferreira’s Tip offers a wry, layered answer. The diptych consists of two photographs: one showing a woman beside a large phallic sculpture in profile, the other taken head-on, with the woman’s face and the sculpture’s urethral opening both clearly in view. From the side, the sculpture reads unmistakably as a penis, while the woman remains anonymous with her face turned away. From the front, her beauty is revealed but the sculpture becomes an abstraction. Only in the interplay of both images does a fuller image emerge. As Yi Hou notes in his curatorial statement, the deviated body “destabilizes the normative body. It works it; resignifies it. It declares its own freedom (to deviate). When we say that one’s body is tea, it implies that the body can constitute its own drama, worthy of awe and gossip, soft gasps. Enough of a deviation to rework the very notion of what a body is and what it could be.”
From left: Martine Gutierrez, Ser Serpas, Oscar yi Hou, Nash Glynn, Michael Stamm, James Bantone, Doron Langberg, and Cameron Patricia Downey.
Still, some of the show’s most compelling works pivot away from the body altogether—or rather concern themselves with its lack. Cameron Patricia Downey’s 0_o consists of a standard-issue office chair, its steel legs extended absurdly upward to meet the ceiling. At first, the piece reads as functionalist absurdism, but the longer one looks, the stranger it becomes. Its upholstery recalls a budget hotel, its upward stretch suggests celestial ambition, evoking a business conference throne for a god. That same push-pull appears in Ser Serpas’ sculpture rollin made to measure will extender grasp in every making amended, assembled from an old treadmill, cracked windshield, and dust-covered bench press. This cosmology of suburban masculinity is reconfigured into a kind of devotional relic, a monolith built from the flotsam of a dying world. Both works gesture toward a kind of transcendence, through recontextualization. And the radical reuse of late Anthropocene junk. Both of these objects’ power lies not in self-display, but in refusal: they displace the gaze entirely, offering objects too strange to fully decode.
Running through May 7th, Deviations contains a multitude of ideas across its fifteen works. At the opening last week, the familial atmosphere underscored the show’s social foundations: a scene seeing itself on the gallery walls. At the afterparty in a nearby loft, the “web of sociality” materialized in real time. Pe Ferreira DJed a baile funk set with Emilio Tamez dancing just behind her. Sam Penn chatted on a couch with “Max” Battle, the subject of one of her photos. Oscar Yi Hou sat on a bed, holding court, surrounded by collaborators and friends.
Deviations captures more than a curatorial thesis—it captures a moment. A snapshot of New York’s queer downtown scene articulating itself to one another, in all its many reflections and refractions.
From left: Sam Penn, Pe Ferreira, Juliana Huxtable, and Emilio Tamez.
