The title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is translated from the Spanish phrase Ataque de nervios. The idea of a nervous breakdown does not provide a perfect parallel to an “attack of the nerves,” an idiom long used in the hispanophone world to describe a state of overwhelming emotion, and only sometimes, distress. A nervous breakdown connotes wreck and ruin, desolation of a former self. In contrast, within an ataque there’s a space for abundance, exuberance, and an unmistakable sense of self. There is a tension then between what audiences receive and what we see. Our codex for translation is insufficient for the task that it has been given.

The idea of insufficiency is central to how I feel about the critical lens provided by curator Lisa Wainwright for her show, “Women on the Verge,” at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. In the written materials for the overstuffed survey of twenty-seven artists, Wainwright cites the timeliness of examining the resurgence of “feminist expression that currently lampoons the female body” in light of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. From queering the lens to challenging the colonial gaze, Wainwright’s essay flits from theory to theory without an in-depth analysis of any of the contours the exhibition defines itself within. The multitude of reference points that are provided are further tied to second-wave feminism, specifically the movement’s discourse on bodily autonomy. Think of the questions, how does your body work? How can it work? What kind of work do you enjoy? Now think about what it might mean to have a body that is “othered” by society, whether through queerness, race, gender expression, sex, or disability. These are questions too big, too weighty, and too important for the sparse time and attention given to them in an exhibition lacking focused, consistent curation.

What does it mean for art to “lampoon” the female body? The definition of lampoon is to criticize something or someone, usually well known, in order to make them appear ignorant, or silly, something worthy of ridicule. Is this what the art in “Women on the Verge” does to its subject matter? I would argue no and that the show’s claim of lampooning amounts to a misrecognition, a misstatement, a mistranslation of its own desired central claim. Think of the Eileen Myles essay on Carolee Schneemann’s art, “The Cunt Speaks,” written for the Barbican’s 2022 retrospective of Schneemann’s work. In the essay, Myles writes that at the heart of Schneemann’s work, and its unyielding friction-filled closeness, is the claim “if you are blocking me for being female, I will thrust the magnificence of my armature in your face.” That, Myles continues, is “the god touch.” 

The idea of a “god touch”; thrusting the idea of femaleness, what is othered, what is negated, what is open-ended yet endless under the contours of a phallic discourse in a patriarchal economic and legal landscape is what I think “Women on the Verge” hopes to embrace. The artists included in the show are able to touch, scrape, and capture such a gesture with aplomb, but the works accomplish these feats on their own merits.

With figures that bring to mind the canonical reclining nude or the bather, each work included in the exhibition takes care to disassemble and dissect the female coded body in order to better understand what the possibility of the “other” entails. In Caitlin Cherry’s 2022 Immolation, a Black female or femme figure stands centered in the picture plane. The figure wears a cropped top and bikini bottoms, with earrings and a choker, along with eyelashes and a belly chain that dangles upon their hips. In the top right corner, another figure bends forward to whisper to the person at the painting’s center. As she stands, legs akimbo, swirls of blue and pink merge with the brown of their skin tone. Upon their arms, upper thighs, and the center of the forehead, spotted swirls of black paint vibrate outward. The title of the piece, referencing a death by burning, makes one think that these spots of illumination against the warmth of her skin are gems of onyx heat—a fire, a crackling of flame—that signals entrance into a new world. Like celluloid set ablaze, or digital glitches that consume themselves, Cherry’s figure stands like Saint Sebastian with their wounds, ready to be a part of our myriad worlds to come.

In Elizabeth Glaessner’s 2023 Medusa, repeated radioactive green women dot the canvas on their hands and knees. A potentially pregnant stomach and breasts hang low with gravity as a faceless figure points their faces into the unseen horizon. Underneath the woman on their hands and knees, two people on their backs look upward against a background of phosphorescent, oceanic blue and curves of mossy brown. In the background, smears of storm-riddled blues, grays, and medicinal green light merge into the picture plane. A cold green arm bisects the frame with the glow of radium, or a girl’s makeshift nightlight. The arm connects to a face peeking out of the top off the plane, an eye unabashedly looking back at its viewer, with half a pair of lips curving into a wry smile. Medusa became her myth, grew to occupy her legend, through the trauma of her sexual assault. Her pain, her violation, her desecration, was frozen and taken to become the whole of her personhood. She is the figure whose pain becomes something frightening and isolating; she lives beyond the boundaries of acceptable. Yet here she is peeking out from the picture plane, looking right at you, with the gaze that asks how far have you gone, how far have you been pushed outside the fragile membrane of what is accepted, what is nice?

Both Glaessner and Cherry’s pieces follow the sentiment at the heart of Myles’ claim—that in response to dismissal, belittling, or abuse, let the pain of beauty, of othering, of abjection, become glory and make sure they never forget who you are. With long flowing dark hair, the central figure in Caleb Yono’s Interdimensional femmes/rescue of the Vivian girls/finger fire (2023), stands within a field of crimson blooms. Flowers slink around the figure’s nails, which slice across the chlorinated green-hued sky of the picture plane. The titular Vivian girls refers to artist Henry Darger’s magnum opus, a fifteen-thousand-page multimedia novel centered on the adventures of a group of children collectively known as the “Vivian Girls.” In Darger’s work, the Vivian girls were usually to be found in a state of distress and had to use their combined strength, wit, and tenacity to change their circumstances. I like to think that these girls were never in need of a traditional rescue, and the “rescue” referenced by Yono’s piece rather refers to the ability to grow up. The painting’s central figure was once such a girl but now, as a femme, they can slice through the skies of galaxies, leaving fire and stars behind in their wake.

This idea of growing up brings to mind another imperfect parallel, the changes that occurred during the shift from second wave to third wave feminism. In the popular imaginary, such a change can be marked by the appearance of the Reagan-era girlboss, the female CEO, women who got ahead at the expense of other women, and to the application of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality within the social and legal movements of the nineties and early aughts. Perhaps, too, this change can be applied to the relationship between“Women on the Verge’s” art and curation; that in spite of a lack of time, care, and attention, all of us possess that unmistakable, undeniable, unbreakable, touch of god.

Annette LePique is an arts writer. Her interests include the moving image and psychoanalysis. She has written for Newcity, ArtReview, Chicago Reader, Stillpoint Magazine, Spectator Film Journal, and others.