Installation image of Phantom Body by Kat Ryals.
Exhibition essay co-created by Alissa Polan and Jennifer Tazewell Mawby.
To feel is to remember.
To remember is to resist.
In Phantom Body, the aftershocks of rupture, political, personal, and physical, are not erased; they are summoned. What remains after silencing and fragmentation is not absence but presence: charged, alive, and insistent.
Phantom Body is co-presented by Paradice Palase and Gloria’s Project Space and runs from May 10 to June 1, 2025, at Gloria’s Project Space, 5 Eldridge Street, New York. It is the second in a series of collaborative exhibitions by the 22 artists of the Paradice Palase network.
Borrowing from the medical phenomenon of phantom limb syndrome, the experience of feeling a missing part of oneself, Phantom Body becomes a metaphor for emotional and political haunting. Each work performs a tender insurgency, resisting erasure, tending to invisible wounds, and reclaiming interior spaces as sites of force and transformation.
Threaded through every material choice and quiet act of endurance is a commitment to care as resistance, to absence as resonance, and to fragility as strength. These gestures shape how memory is carried, how survival is marked, and how internal worlds become sites of strength and visibility.
An emotional terrain of bodily traces runs through this exhibition. Some artists, like Caroline Heffron, Diana Jean Puglisi, and Christy E. O’Connor, dwell in the fragmented yet insistent presence of the body. Others, Tina Lam, Melanie Brewster, and Carol Paik, craft tactile surfaces that invite viewers to see with their skin, navigating folded textures of memory and sensation. Then there are those, including Jessica Soininen-Eddis, Adina Andrus, and Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, who chart speculative or geographies, dreamlike zones shaped by survival and desire. Alissa Polan and LaThoriel Badenhausen gather layered symbols, feminist relics, and salvaged fragments to summon myths of reclamation and emotional repair.
Audre Lorde reminds us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” In this spirit, Phantom Body elevates care not as sentimentality but as strategy, resilience, and an embodied politics of refusal.
This is a gathering of contemporary women-identifying artists who hold quiet power in their hands, their threads, their surfaces, and their silences. Across paintings, sculptures, collages, and assemblages, Phantom Body traces how the body persists in the impressions it leaves behind, how recollection outlasts harm, and how tenderness becomes a form of political action.
With ceramic and Tyvek, Adina Andrus constructs intricate systems of memory in Game: Black #3, Game: Black #5, and Sitting Room (East). Her invented symbolic language, etched into tile and wall, conjures personal and collective archives without stable ground. In Sitting Room (East), she leans into abstraction and surrealism, offering internalised domestic spaces shaped by trauma and shifting recollection.
Reconfiguring the discarded, Alissa Polan stitches and pastes together the detritus of consumer culture in Creating all Manner of Fun and Embodies Mid-Century Sleekness with a Welcoming Touch. Packaging, images, and ephemera form surreal dreamscapes of longing and collapse. In the latter, an empty jacket holds the ghost of a body beside a fading sunset. Her works gesture toward incomplete narratives and hollow promises, equal parts critique and ache.
In Be Still and Fuzzy Logic, Carol Paik braids memory into material. Old garments are woven into soft structures, each fold carrying the weight of tenderness and the imprint of labour. These are not static sculptures but tactile vessels of lived experience and emotional endurance.
Figures slip between presence and myth in Caroline Heffron’s Chain Reaction and Hold On. Her ceramic and painted forms emerge from dreamlike urban landscapes, spaces where survival becomes sanctuary. Suspended between grounding and flight, Heffron’s bodies resist objectification. They stand in a state of emotional autonomy, shaped by vulnerability, strength, and recollection.
Rather than depict trauma, Christy E. O’Connor sutures it. Her stitched torsos in Carried Trauma I and Carried Trauma V mark the persistence of pain and the strange beauty of wounds that refuse to close. Red threads trace what lies beneath the skin, insisting on the life of the altered body.
Softness becomes topography in Diana Jean Puglisi’s, Her one way, and then another, Lumpy, bumpy, diffusely vascular, and dormant, and Phantom as Herself. With velvet, cast forms, and heirloom fabric, she maps the terrain of the postpartum, the ancestral, the changing body. In Lumpy, bumpy…, layered materials swell and slump, becoming tactile sites of care, rupture, and survival.
Jennifer Tazewell Mawby reimagines the archive as an unreliable narrator in her copper point works Compass Bird Star People Tablet, Split Sun Table Mosaic, and the small figure Cerulean Jessica. These speculative artifacts blend classical references with feminist myth-making, inscribing presence into absence and layering real and invented histories. Cerulean Jessica intimately portrays just one of the archaic Three Graces, reflecting on how the narratives of real bodies can be co-opted, conflated, and mythologized.
With cloth, colour, and inherited objects, Jessica Soininen-Eddis builds psychic interiors. City of Girls and So Tired of Fighting the Dark Side envelop viewers in intimate contradiction, where floral remnants and children’s clothes become repositories of care and grief. These spaces, neither resolved nor static, hold emotional complexity like a second skin.
Excavating the domestic, LaThoriel Badenhausen treats salvaged hair nets, textiles, and found materials as sacred artefacts. In Guilt Quilt and Hair Net, she recovers the invisible tools of feminine labour, reanimating them as vessels of resistance and memory. Her works ask what lingers in the materials we use to hold ourselves together.
Melanie Brewster conjures queered myths of nurture and mourning in Bottle Fed and In memory of what, V. Drawing from the Roman she-wolf, her suspended sculptures resemble bodily offerings, lactating ghosts, or vessels for collective grief. They hover between prayer and protest, grief and care.
Tina Lam listens to the earth with foil. In Aerial Lazuli, La Tierra del Fuego, and Space Twins, crumpled aluminium takes on the memory of natural forms. In La Tierra del Fuego, twisted foil layered with wax becomes a quiet gesture of embrace. Her process—hugging roots with foil before colouring—transforms into a method of care, an act of contact and repair.
Across Phantom Body, the archive is not sterile but sensate. Absence is not void but evidence. The artists gathered here enact what Audre Lorde called the transformation of silence into language and action. Their gestures, deliberate and intimate, become political acts of survival, reclamation, and remembering.
This is no elegy, though grief hums beneath the surface. It is an exhibition of persistence, of lives remade from fracture. In the words of artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, whose Precarios honour fragility as sacred, these works call forth what has been lost, not to lament, but to live with it.
In a time when bodily autonomy, queer rights, and collective memory are under threat, Phantom Body insists that softness is not surrender. It is strategy. It is memory made flesh. It is a quiet force that will not vanish.
References:
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. Boston: South End Press, 1993.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Vicuña, Cecilia. Precarios (1960s–present).
Mawby, Polan – 2025