Suburbcel
"Werewolves don't have to pay taxes" combines surrealism and social critique through a hybrid representation. At its center, a figure resembling a gothic lolita doll, with her bright pink bow and lace bonnet, long, curled eyelashes, merges with traits of a standing rat. This creature evokes a metamorphosis, both childlike and unsettling, creating a contrast between delicate ornamentation and its animalistic appearance.
In the background, a blurry parking lot grounds the image in a banal everyday reality, adding to the strangeness of the scene. The satirical title "Werewolves don't have to pay taxes" engages in a critical reflection on privilege and dynamics of exclusion within social structures. The werewolf, as a liminal creature, escapes the constraints of the established order. This commentary could also extend to how femininity, as a social construct, imposes almost invisible yet omnipresent constraints, like "taxes" that must be paid to exist within societal norms.
Suburcel, the title of her first solo exhibition with Ballon Rouge, is an invented term which corresponds to the contraction of the term "Suburb" and the word "Incel;" the word implies a hatred of coming from the suburbs, from the province, from housing estates - far from where everything seems to be happening. It echoes greediness and exclusion. Life happens elsewhere. “In between states where nothing happens” (2023) is a small bench; it’s an in-between state where you always wait for an upcoming change, a bus, a date, as hours pass. It’s a metaphor, a land of hope and boredom, of waiting.
On the back of the bench, eyes morph into a Skyline view. On the wall beside it is a print on aluminum titled “Subdivision, vision continues to divide” (2023). The windows of the subdivision lot shine bright when the sun goes down. If the grass is always greener on the other side, behind the glass it always seems warmer. Clothes and accessories are shiny artifacts, vindictive slogans on a bright color shirt, jeans, New York view imprinted in jersey fabric caught in shiny plastic resin. The clothing implies a body. Our clothes are our personality, our performance.
