The showstopper in Vaginal Davis’s new exhibition, Magnificent Product, at MoMA PS1 is a big phallus tucked right into a rotating mattress, titled “The Depraved Pavilion: Tween Bed room” (2021). This large recreation of the multidisciplinary artist’s preteen bed room winks satirically on the viewer: A big erect penis — supposedly an emblem of masculine virility — is surrounded by pink, culturally coded as female. On the wall within the nook of the bed room is an image of activist Angela Davis, to whom the artist nods along with her nom de plume.
Each work by Vaginal Davis performs some sort of recreation with scale. That outdated adage “measurement issues” doesn’t totally articulate the ways in which Ms. Davis (as she’s usually referred to) enlarges and shrinks her material, however it displays the punk undercurrents of her artwork. The fairy godmother of the Los Angeles queercore scene, she introduced gender-bending to the punk and hardcore music scenes of LA and New York within the 1970 and ’80s earlier than additional establishing herself as an artist and curator.
For her survey, Ms. Davis oscillates between the miniature and the monumental as a method to jolt viewers out of complacency and see the imagery anew. Every room at PS1 features like a present inside a present, with an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek title and a special style or theme. For the one-room set up “Sucking Her Unborn Cock – Archivist Headache Wall” (Nineteen Seventies–current), she coalesces innumerable tiny items of ephemera and photographs that painting herself and members of her counterculture. Conversely, “HAG – small, modern, haggard” (2012) is an enclosed room with a sharply slanted ground that forces viewers to confront massive sculptures of Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake created from sourdough and preservatives. The ground slant is so excessive that footing can really feel unstable. The partitions are coated with silkscreened silhouettes of ladies’s faces, which Ms. Davis calls “Lesbiana Domesticity wallpaper” (2012).
Ms. Davis’s use of scale to coax double takes is most evident in “The Depraved Pavillon: the Fantasia Library” (2021). Utilizing nail polish and make-up, she creates small likenesses of the queer, Black, and punk writers who encourage her on the again of postcards and different ephemera. For instance, the small scale of an Octavia Butler portrait attracts us in shut, maybe to ponder the bounds of make-up as a medium and an emblem for the underappreciated artistic geniuses who don’t occur to be pale, male, and straight as a nail.
In distinction, the sheer quantity of archival ephemera featured within the one-room set up “Sucking Her Unborn Cock – Archivist Headache Wall (Nineteen Seventies-present) feels colossal. Lots of of photographs and flyers are stashed behind curtains, so viewers need to actually peak behind the veil. Vaginal Davis as soon as remarked in an interview that “Excessive femme perception and dedication on all issues provides my artwork that particular oomph that pulls individuals in from all walks of life.” That oomph is amplified by a scaling up and cutting down that pulls us in earlier than dealing with us with the artist’s grand legacy and iconoclastic presence.
Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product, continues at MoMA PS1 (22–25 Jackson Avenue, Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens) by means of March 2, 2026. The exhibition was organized by Hendrik Folkerts; the New York iteration was organized by Jody Graf and Sheldon Gooch.
