In the preface to the 1907 edition of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady—the story of a young woman forced to confront, to reckon with her own life—James recalls the process of forming his main character. He writes: “By what process of logical accretion was this slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?” James was thinking here of the anxieties he encountered in crafting the mind of a young woman. Who was she? What does she think? How does she act? I can only assume that part of James believed he set himself out on an impossible task—what would she do? We encounter a similar impossibility in “Our Delicate Armor’s” exploration of femininity, vulnerability, and strength. I say this as the show with six artists at Stasias Gallery in Chicago rightfully eschews any prescriptive or didactic view of femininity. Rather, there is a lyrical looseness at play, a vibration reminiscent of living in gangly limbs and wondering what it might feel like to be touched for the first time—anticipating, waiting for the future to come. An endless, searching, delicious question: who would you become?

        Curated by Veronica Clements and featuring work by Anne-Joelle Tan, Bambi Kunst, Caleb Yono, Jewlya Sturrtevant, Veronica Clements, and Virginia Pearl Kidd, the show is a breath of fresh air. It gives new life to what it means to ask, to search—to be an It Girl, this girl, a lonely girl, a girl not yet a woman, a cool girl, a clean girl, a girl, a girl, a girl. Below, I think through three pieces within the show in an effort to better understand what makes the girl who wears this delicate armor. My thoughts are loose and gangly; they speckle and fall like shards of blueberry scented glitter. What follows is not so much a classic review but a page torn from a secret diary. Perhaps that is girlhood’s preferred form, the diary—the only place where you can really truly know what a girl will do next.

        There is a scene in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1947) where Belle is beset by a hall of candelabras while trapped in the Beast’s castle. Perhaps beset is not the right word, but a sort of strange magic lives here, for the candelabras’ arms are human and their human hands hold the candles that yearn and breathe in time with every turn of Belle’s head. I think of this moment when I think about desiring as a, the desire of a, girl. A girl is often cultural shorthand for someone, something, new and fresh, dewy and hunted. You are not sure who is after you, but the air vibrates whenever you enter a room. You make things change; flowers and hands reach towards you. Maybe this is all a reminder that you are alive; that lonely castle is alive; that waiting beast is alive; that burning heart that lives just under your skin is, too, alive.

 

        I think of this scene in front of Virgina Pearl Kidd’s Bramble (2024). Creeping green ceramic vines hang louche on the gallery wall, the sturdy stalks laced with squat thorns. These shades of green change with minute precision; dapples of sickly yellow unexpectedly announce a coming rot. From each vine blooms several flower blossoms, pale pink and washed carnation; red petals splay open. Petals—fat like moonflowers, soft like lips—reach upward, blossom heads frozen in the morning’s glory. Within each flower there sits a white taper candle, snugly held by ceramic petals. Some of the candles have faster burn times than their brethren. Some candles stand tall, like the candles held by the mysterious hands of the Beast’s castle. Others sit squat in their flower, wicks just peeking over the rims of their blossoms. Some petals are obscured by drips of melted wax and haloed by the black singe of the wick’s ash. Some blossoms sit empty, a sweaty sheen of ash and waxy stalagmites the only memories of the fire they once housed. Four of Kidd’s flowering vines are positioned on the gallery’s wall in the pattern of a rough-hewn diamond. When its candles are lit, the piece seems to coil and undulate against the soft, warm light. It’s a fever, this gothic imagination. All girls have it. We’re terminal cases. When the candles are extinguished, the lick of the flames and the call of their fantasy—stops. Smoke ash shadow stains the wall.

 

        We are now taken to the bedroom, the privacy of cyberspace, the silent halls of glinting silver eyeshadow. We’re 21st century girls. “Veronica Clements’ She’s So Lucky (2024) is outlined by a gradient border of blue filled with rabbit heads, hair bows, cherries, barbed-wire roses, and topped by a single heart. The iconography is similar, knowingly so, to the images on a slot machine or online makeover game. Cut her hair, change her clothes, shave her legs. Pluck, primp, press; remember you are always on stage. Are you feeling lucky? Within the border’s lower left foreground, a fleshy pink oyster shell, perfect in its symmetry, opens to reveal an iridescent pearl. Above the oyster floats an Internet dialogue box with “trust the process” written in Old English font—a gothic-inspired design popularized on 90s era baby tees and nameplate necklaces. Two mouse cursors are captured clicking on the dialogue box. The numbers “777” illuminate the lower right-hand corner of the picture plane with a nocturnal neon glow.

        These images are gestures and artifacts, they float together within a depthless blue space similar to the Myspace profiles of Internet past. They are a surface of a girl, things she might like or might find meaningful. They are half-formed desires of a person who learns quickly that their reflection often differs from their interior world, a truth communicated by the three-dimensional water droplets that Clements’s brush drops throughout the picture plane. The water dots the background, upsetting the blue’s crystalline cool. This is not a browser window; this is a shower door. A girl’s face, of indeterminate age, race, ethnicity, is painted in smeared, slashing colors. Her face appears to be melting, raining, obscured from any observing eyes. She could be screaming, she could be singing, she could be masturbating, she could be thinking. She could be doing nothing at all. The title of the piece feels like a reference to the 2000 Britney Spears’s single “Lucky.” In the song’s chorus the pop star sings: “She’s so lucky, she’s a star. But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart.” We don’t know Spears’s sad, lucky girl, but we feel like we do. The knowledge, the presumptions, the expectations that the world thrusts upon a girl like Spears’s or Clements’s occurs because she is a girl, and that she exists. We live in a world of screens and stages, and it is upon these platforms that you, the girl, are born.

 

        Where do you go though, when there is no audience and only you are upon that stage? Where do you go when no one looks, when no one sees you? How do you become the girl, the consumer made for public consumption? How do you become yourself, apart from the other? Bambi Kunst’s Love Interest with Amnesia (2024) is a piece with two lives. At the time of this writing, a night black canvas, rendered from snail secretion filtrate, lube, and deadstock Balenciaga nylon micro-canvas in the color Caviar, sits and waits. The canvas is a blank, an empty screen, an opaque expectation. The work’s materials hint at the nature of this expectation; it’s wet, smooth, and expensive.

        On August 31st, the final day of the exhibition, Kunst activated the canvas in an hour long live performance. Now Kunst calls the canvas, that piece which holds its breath, a “painting that has forgotten itself. Or a performance yet to be realized.” The title of Kunst’s piece is taken from a trope in popular culture where the love interest, usually female, appears from nowhere to sweep the protagonist off their feet. This is done without the knowledge of the love interest for they have no ulterior motives, no complicated interior world, no foresight nor past. They are the beautiful blank slate upon which the protagonist looks with love and sees an angel’s wings. For the love interest is there to be wooed, not to do the wooing. It is an old trope, being seen through the eyes of the lover, the beloved that exists only for them. The beloved does not have an interior chamber that the lover cannot access. To even think of the beloved in absence of the lover appears like sacrilege; it is a defeat of purpose, a violation of cause and effect. The beloved is commonly coded as feminine because of their receptivity; they wait, they will themselves to be filled, to be written by the lover. For whom are you to be a subject, the author of this story?

        The beloved’s gender is also shorthand for the perils of subjecthood. Female, or one coded as feminine, is a subject that does not easily fit within the discourse. This subject, this seemingly blank beauty, is too capacious for a simple rise and fall of understanding. This subject is not even really a subject; it’s a swirling unknown, a changeable infinite, a head of many pronged longings and whims that outnumber the figs in the most bountiful of harvests. How do you even begin to understand all that canvas, that body, that velvet black nylon entails? How can you ever even think you will fully understand that girl?

        “Our Delicate Armor” gives life to this proverbial girl. The exhibition explores the messy in-betweenness of power and gender embodied within her outline; and in these spaces breathes more than you can ever imagine. Through the work of the show’s six artists, you learn about the girl, you see her, you feel her yearn, you might even know her. Or do you? It’s that evergreen uncertainty, that million-dollar baby question that “Delicate Armor” importantly keeps unanswered.

 

Annette LePique is an arts writer. She has written for Momus, Hyperallergic, Newcity, ArtReview, Chicago Reader, Stillpoint Magazine, Spectator Film Journal, and others. She was the winner of a Rabkin Prize for Art Journalism in 2023 and has an interest in psychoanalysis.