Ophelia Arc's debut solo show, we’re just so glad you’re home

Ophelia’s work is for the disturbed girlies (transcendent of gender) who didn’t choose this life but accepted it and locked in.

Ophelia Arc: we’re just so glad you’re home || Curated by Nakai Falcón || April 18 - June 1, 2024

I went to see Ophelia Arc’s debut solo exhibition at 81 Leonard Gallery back in May and it was visceral to say the least. In case you missed it, the show at the just off Broadway TriBeCa gallery explores themes of resolution, mortality, and conditions of the corporeal and psychological through the fibrous art of crochet which Ophelia extends as a language into sculpture, drawing, and video. Curated by Nakai Falcón, we’re just so glad you’re home burrows deep into the psyche, shining an unflinching light on the obfuscated anathema of home, family, and the generation of identity that is too often left to fester in the shadows of society’s consciousness.

I met Ophelia during our overlapping semester in the Hunter College BFA and have been inspired and in awe of her work (and work ethic) ever since. She very literally pours her life into her work – time, focus, energy, and even blood. Known to crochet all throughout class, while on the subway, and in ten hour studio sessions, the brutality of Ophelia’s practice as an artist subverts stereotypes by taking an act that is synonymous with patience and relaxation and pushing the medium to extremes contrary to the frankly misogynistic and belittling established preconceptions associated with the decorative arts.

Upon arriving at the space, we see what Ophelia refers to as “flayings” in the windows – one that looks like a skin hung to dry composed of yarn and latex on meat hooks and another that resembles a placenta. Their eerie ability to look so much like our flesh and innards comes from Ophelia’s deep diving into health and medical books. The depiction of decomposition is medically accurate and effectively unsettling, made that much more real by the use of mold-infused water and dead flowers in her pigmentation process. 

Her assemblages (made of materials like thread, latex, crochet thread, acrylic sheet, and even Goya cookies) are mounted monuments to not only wounding but healing. Sometimes connected to one another and hung with ribbon, the signification of the living death that is prescribed to those imprisoned by the social frameworks for femininity as well as roles and dynamics dictated to those gendered as women is inescapable. The works are meditations upon the act of unpacking pain within past experiences in order to seek reconciliation, acceptance, and forgiveness – a practice referred to as “wound dwelling” that was conceptualized by author Leslie Jamison.  Despite the seeming resistance to leaning into the analeptic, I can’t help but consider that old shamanic truism that the antidote is usually found in the poison.

Much like Edward Hopper’s paintings of houses such as his House by the Railroad (1925), Ophelia exploits the seemingly domiciliary and mundane, pushing it into the realm of the uncanny to evoke such the oft repressed, culturally taboo topics of terror and villainy that lie under the finely constructed and stylized surface of the domestic, intimate, and familial (especially as it relates to the infantile as well as maternal). Ophelia is in this way a medium invoking the phantom of trauma through her anthropomorphic, abstracted, and ambiguous creations.

Flesh toned palettes, exposed cavities, and limb-like tendrils reminiscent of organic matter extend that convergence of all that is and all that was that is the body into the gallery where we bear voyeuristic witness to what the artist refers to as a “constructed mythos”. This is no more obvious than in her video work, which is particularly captivating. Being only able to truly see the video entitled “flesh home” through holes in a flesh-colored crochet patch work sculptural construction hung on meat hooks, we witness her struggling to find balance as she bumps around a space with the very same crocheted meat sack enveloping her. Open secrets surrounding body dysmorphia and disordered eating; dissociation and mental illness; diabolically fraught, parasitic mother-daughter relationships; absentee fathers; grief; distress; loss; and finally, resignation are brought to the fore and displayed in an iconoclastic vulnerability for everyone to see. 

From the sketches and drawings to the gruesome yet ethereal sculptures, we’re just so glad you’re home is both macabre and unsettling. It is deeply poetic and perhaps one of the best representations of what it feels like to write a poem that I’ve ever seen in the 3D (and 4D) – all enshrined in yarn and suture thread. As someone who can intimately relate to this experience embodied by the deformed symbols of nurturing and care, it is also comforting. Ophelia’s work is for the disturbed girlies (transcendent of gender) who didn’t choose this life but accepted it and locked in.