A little tenderness with Soft Body, Hard Gaze

Do we exist if we don’t generate internet content? Soft Body, Hard Gaze asks difficult questions of living as a human in a digital age. When even human tenderness is performative for the algorithm, what is real?

Two artists are featured in Soft Body, Hard Gaze: Jeremie Rose Winbrow, and Pascale Jean. Winbrow’s contributions to the exhibition consist of a series of woven tapestries. Feelings are a glitch in the system is a koan on the dehumanizations of daily internet usage. The centre-aligned bold letter text is designed to disrupt consciousness, calling back to Barbara Kruger’s iconoclastic messaging.

Pascale Jean’s oil paintings are the titular soft bodies of the exhibition. Hot pink and sinewy, Jean’s work is as memetic as Winbrow’s, but vulnerably grounded in the flesh. Pascale Jean’s After Midnight features a transfeminine penis, which is the focus of much objectification and fetishization on the internet in today’s moral panic. The lower half of a human body, framed on a television test pattern, is a representation of the bodily dissociation of internet sex, vulnerable and tender. Couldn’t we all use a little tenderness? 

Soft Body, Hard Gaze will be in exhibition at Good Sport Gallery from May 3rd to May 25th, 2024.