Join us for the Opening Reception of Paradise, Curated by Graham Feyl & J. Sova!
PARADISE
FEBRUARY 27TH - JUNE 6TH, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION FEBRUARY 27TH, 6-8PM
“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” - José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009).
“Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Alchemize terror into art.” Olivia Laing on artist Derek Jarman in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020).
This Paradise is not a distant, utopian place or future. It is unbounded in time and space, built and rebuilt endlessly by those cast out: the queer, the other. Paradise asks: What is survival in a world with ever-ending apocalypses such as climate devastation, genocide, the stripping of human rights, xenophobia, and rampant capitalist greed? More specifically, how do those historically pushed to the margins build their own worlds and sense of paradise in order to survive, connect, and seek pleasure?
Rather than frame Paradise strictly in terms of its relationship to enclosed, idealized
garden spaces - evoking benign, historical tropes - the exhibition presents itself as an
unruly space. Unruly as in: disorderly, wild, uncontrollable, disruptive, and disobedient.
Terms that have been used against and to describe those of us who defy and resist
normative standards and expectations. It is within this unruliness that this exhibition
situates itself; it is here in untamed space that Paradise begins to take shape.
Paradise brings together works by thirteen U.S.-based artists responding to the urgent
labor of shaping something from nothing. Moving between installation, painting, video,
and sculpture, they trouble and explore ways of world-building, resistance, relationality,
and storytelling. They alchemize terror into art, reminding us that paradise is not an
idealized elsewhere but a shared practice of survival.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS -
Hannah Banciella, Michael Childress, E. Saffronia Downing, Nicholas V. Elbakidze, Angie Jennings, Aaron McIntosh, Jorge Palacios, Lyra Purugganan, Kit Rutter, Brian Smith, J. Sova, Lisa Waud, Yu Yan.
ABOUT THE CURATORS -
Graham //
Graham Feyl (he/him) is an art historian, writer, educator, and curator. His scholarship centers histories of queer and transgender artistic production, design, and material cultures, with an interest in how these intersect with the formation of popular and sexual cultures. He has curated a number of exhibitions - in Chicago, Santa Barbara and Portland - that center around similar ideas. Currently, Graham is a PhD student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art History, Theory and Criticism, and his B.A summa cum laude in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Sova //
J. Sova (they/she) is an artist, organizer, and curator currently based in Portland, Oregon. Their current work and research explore gendered violence, the politics of being a body, and building collective paradises through their queer feminist lens. Before relocating to the Pacific Northwest in 2020, Sova spent a decade in Chicago. There she received a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and founded The Overlook, a nomadic arts project to support BIPOC, Femme, and Queer makers and thinkers through residencies, exhibitions, and public programming. Sova has exhibited and screened works nationally and internationally. In 2025 she launched Body of Work: Artist + Embodiment Coaching, to support artists and creatives to build deeper and sustainable connections to their bodies, art, and practices.