Paradise
curated by Graham Feyl & Jenn Sova
February 27th - June 6th, 2025
Opening reception February 27th, 6-8PM
Howard Sooley's photograph of Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage Gardens
“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)
Paradise asks: What is survival in a world with ever-ending apocalypses such as war, climate devastation, the stripping of human rights, and rampant capitalism? Specifically, how do those historically pushed to the margins build their own sense of paradise and worlds in order to survive, connect, and seek pleasure?
Co-curators Graham Feyl and J. Sova began to navigate these questions through the work of artist Derek Jarman (English, 1942-1994). Jarman’s fight with AIDS and the attention he gave to his garden outside his practice point to a nimble relationship of creation, destruction, and the liminality of the between. As writer Olivia Laing describes Jarman’s precarious state: “Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemize terror into art.” Alchemizing terror into art is a central thread in the web of Paradise. The fifteen artists in the exhibition trouble and explore ways of survival, world-building, resistance, fostering relationships with the land, and community building.
Paradise proposes the idea of paradise not as a distant place, or a utopian future, but one that is unbounded temporally and has been built and rebuilt endlessly by those who have found themselves outside of normativity. We offer a queer reading of paradise that presents the idyllic as an endless possibility.
Participating artists -
Hannah Banciella, E. Saffronia Downing, Nicholas V. Elbakidze, Aaron McIntosh, Jorge Palacios, Lyra Purugganan, Kit Rutter, Brian Smith, J. Sova, and Lisa Waud.
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.