Elevated Embrace
Mae Howard and Gabriella Moreno
July 26th - August 24th, 2024
Opening reception July 26th, 6-9pm
NEW YORK — GHOSTMACHINE Gallery is pleased to present Elevated Embrace, an exhibition of works by Mae Howard and Gabriella Moreno. The exhibition is on view from July 26 through August 24, 2024.
Elevated Embrace brings together works by Howard and Moreno which consider relational aspects integral to power: domination and subjugation. These artists employ tactile materials, text, and forms that signify strength and vulnerability as mutually contained, often in conversation with personal and archival narratives informed by BDSM and disability vantage points. By exploring the interdependency of command and submission, Elevated Embrace destabilizes fixed notions of control and foregrounds the shared participatory negotiation of these mutable social contracts.
Mae Howard’s works explore currents of dependency, labor, and sociality that are inherently queer, strained, bent, at times precarious, deeply interdependent, and full of rejection. Moreso, Howard references elements of kink that are interwoven with disability, proposing the relational aspect that is involved with cruising and power negotiations from a disability and BDSM perspective. In Velocity of a swing, Howard explores suspension as a measurement of pace, space, and time. Rejecting the commonplace association of suspension and stasis, they examine suspension and its relationship to gliding, grasping, and hovering through a series of formal crip improvisation movements, movements primed by disability knowledge. In this space of improvisation, the stasis, rigidity, being stuck is therefore thrown back onto the assumption or presumption that is most likely ableist in a social setting. Concurrently, this idea of suspension as a form of movement prompts critical thought and dialogue on the labor associated with crip improvisational movement for disabled people and in turn, marks crip improvisational movement as a social relation. Howard’s beginning to dance, a written piece presented on a metal display stacked at a slight angle, mirrors the disabled body’s lean and fold against mobility aids, bed, standing and leaning on a counter, and so on. The text recounts an experience the artist had while cruising where an ableist encounter foreshadowed its own suspension. The public nature coded into the display combined with Howard’s personal account relates the idea of crip improvisational movement and suspension within a social setting.
Gabriella Moreno’s Loverskin, a body of work inspired by research that the artist gathered at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, expands the conversations found in hand-typed letters between three correspondents whose exchanges engage in dominant/submissive dynamics. Much of the D/S content in the letters emphasizes the tension between throbbing pain and careful, loving moments core to BDSM relationships. Responding to the hand-typed quality of the letters and the psychic entanglement that they began to feel with the writers after spending extended time with the archival material, Moreno incorporates leather, a metal stamp, and her own physicality by pressing the stamp into the leather, creating a moment of palpable contact embodying the contact of a kiss, a smack, a lash from a whip—quick, flash instants of impact containing both force and relief, a simultaneous display of strength and exposure. By embossing this archived prose into leather with their own hand, Moreno mediates the temporal space between now and then out of her own desire to create a closeness and inclusion within the exchange. She further enacts this linear collapse in Me + U + U + U, a work featuring a photograph consisting of an arrangement of archival images sourced from a collection of vintage pro-domme magazines burnt into a fragment of leather. Moreno aligns these images in a composition where elements such as ropes, chains, leather whips, and body parts connect, creating a playline that weaves together a collectivity between disparate bodies, moments, spaces, and actions.
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Mae Howard (they/them) (b. 1997, Indianapolis, IN) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary approach extends across research-based, participatory, and collaborative projects ranging from lens-based media, sculpture, installation, and performance. Calling upon lineages of disabled/trans labor economies, Howard is interested in the embodied, fleshly, and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, biopolitics, and disability. Their work explores the residue of discard, debilitation, and excess. Mae has performed for Julie Tolentino, Z Tye Richardson, and Wardell Milan. They were a 2023-2024 fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program and a 2024 fellow in EmergeNYC through BAX Arts. They have been a resident artist at pocoapoco, Picture Berlin, and ACRE. Their work has been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Mexico City, and Philadelphia. Howard has a BA in Feminist and Gender Studies from Colorado College and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Gabriella Moreno (b. 1994, New York, NY) is a queer, latine artist whose practice uses the erotic as a lens to probe entanglements of gender, power, and desire. Recent exhibitions include a solo at Underscore (Milwaukee, WI), and In Absentia at the NY Studio School (Brooklyn, NY). She has exhibited at The Border (Brooklyn, NY), Dream Clinic (Columbus, OH), and Olympia (New York, NY). In November she will present a solo show with Mimo Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Moreno earned a GCAC grant in 2024, and an OSU Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship in 2023. She will attend Shandaken Projects at Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY) in August 2024. Moreno has a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts, where she earned the Silas H. Rhodes Scholarship, and received an MFA in Studio Art from The Ohio State University, where she earned the Dean’s Enrichment Fellowship.