Reliquary of Fierceness

“Such is the power of travestis, we attract the gazes of the world,” wrote Camila Sosa Villada in Bad Girls. “No one can escape the allure of a man dressed as a woman, the faggots who go too far, the degenerates everyone stares at.” In the 2019 novel, in which a pink house is the main axis of a reeling band of trans sexworkers, house mother Auntie Encarna is a matriarch to society’s castaways, including a literal infant she rescues from a ditch. Her pink hideout is home to the girls’ strife and their pain, their fears and their resilience, a static point of reprieve amidst their varied and rough lifestyles. It’s pink like the bedroom you weren’t allowed to have as a kid, or the blush from your mom’s vanity. Pink like the inside of your throat, like the feeling when you first saw yourself. A hopeful pink, an obvious pink, our pink, an impossible pink, unreal pink. A diva fortress and incubator, a locus for their shared, straining song.

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On a frenetic block in downtown Manhattan, a recent group exhibition which takes its name from Sosa Villada’s book is a beating heart much like Encarna’s house—only heightened by its singularly pink glow. Curator and writer Devan Diaz and her Bad Girls have transformed the white cube of OCDChinatown into a pink altar for an updated meditation on divatry. Dolls and gays come from a shared lineage: we want something we’re not allowed to have. It is a sore muscle, a limp wrist, a cracking voice, a longing gaze. It’s past, present, and future colliding in one gushing tremolo, the embodied reverberations of some ancient tuning fork. Before the constraints of language, before Spotify and FaceTune and Grindr, we have been guided to ourselves and one another by this chthonic chant. Call it gaydar, call it pagan destiny, there is undeniably a call coming from inside the house. 

Diaz’s curatorial debut, “Bad Girls,” explores themes of idolatry, motherhood, and transsexual potency. Pulled together largely from the work of close friends, her incisive curatorial instinct is as much a part of the show as the works themselves. With photography as the show’s central medium, Diaz offers a perspective on the camera-as-fetish-object that enshrines rather than captures. Fittingly, all of the photos in the show orbit around Jessica Mitrani’s colossal monolith: a static, 25-inch-tall stiletto made for two feet. Zapato Impossible, 2003-2006, is literally an impossible shoe, with only one insert for both feet—this heel was made for gawking. Diaz presents Mitrani’s sculpture as a stand-in for the camera itself: from the center of the gallery it’s pointing at everybody. It’s reminiscent of the panopticon’s watchful gaze, an icon and a binding tool of impossible femininity surveilling the works on the walls as well as the viewer—daring you to try and contort yourself in its image.

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Centered on the gallery’s back wall is Jan Anthonio Diaz’s Mother and Son, 2024, a spellbinding portrait that reimagines the classical trope of Madonna and Child for the canon of transsexual imagery. Lit pristinely from the front, a young trans mother holds her biological son resting languidly at her hip. The pair meet the viewer’s gaze like a modern relic, with a softness only certain mothers are typically allotted. A softness not freely given to transsexuals. Considered either biologically impossible or morally corrupt, the image of transsexual motherhood is culturally shunned. Jan Anthonio shares that the mother in the photo was pushed out of her community when her partner, a trans man, suddenly became pregnant. After carrying the baby to term, the young family was eventually forced to flee to raise their baby in safety—Auntie Encarna’s motherhood-in-exile rings loudly here. The couple found themselves living in Jan Anthonio’s neighborhood in Uptown Manhattan, where his cousins promised the young family fierce protection from threats of violence. Mother and Son is thus more than a family portrait or a modern icon; it’s a distillation of transsexual resilience.

Nearby hangs a quieter portrait of motherhood: Reynaldo Rivera’s 1993 Olga, La Plaza reveals a tender yet tense moment between a queen and her drag mother backstage. In this brief moment of dissociated undress, Olga appears despondent. Her mother, perched to the right of the frame and just out of focus, stands on guard waiting for her to return, steady like Auntie Encarna’s own hope for her girls. Juxtaposed, Olga, La Plaza reads like the prayer that’s granted in Jan Anthonio’s Mother and Son. The diva’s aching tremor mumbled aloud.

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Nefertiti, the Virgin Mary, and Marilyn Monroe: our desires animate icons to offer the promise of another life. In the age of the selfie this process has become a closed circuit—we are both projection and vessel. Cruz Valdez's abrasive and sacrificial self-portrait bears the violence of sex reassignment surgery, likening it to a crucifixion. With emphatic downward motion, the artist squats over a geometric sculpture planted firmly on the ground and pointing selfwards, its sharp tip threatening the softness of her new vagina. Part sacrificial iconography, part medical document, Valdez’s piece visually distills the masochism of transition into a framed Virgin Mary. Valdez shares that she finds solace in knowing that her form in the still image isn’t actually her—once frozen in grain or pixel, she becomes a vector. A potential Marilyn for some other wandering diva-in-training, a hanging cross to ward off evil. 

Sebastian Acero’s polaroid collage, which features Valdez as its subject, is a literal cross: five prints themselves forming a body. This piece came together spontaneously when the two were hanging out shortly after Valdez’s gender-affirming surgery—the affinity of that moment echoed by the immediate nature of the medium. She gazes tenderly at the camera in the top photo, the crown of the cross, while the arms and abdomen of the cross reveal her bare chest and concealed pelvis. The base of the cross shows her hand to her hip, her newly-constructed sex softly turned away. Juxtaposed to Valdez’s hard-edged portrait, Acero’s collage stands out as a lyrical document of kinship and knowing, made by an artist who himself grew up a student of feminine adornment, watching as his mom did hair for all the local girls in his neighborhood. Valdez shares she had never seen herself photographed so tenderly, it moved her to tears. 

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Relegated to the sidelines of femininity, dolls and gays become experts of looking from a young age. We watch as our moms get ready to go out; we peer through a window into an all-girls ballet class; we shoot our gaze like a weapon. This learned voyeurism is the survival skill of a well-studied diva, a necessarily misbehaved girl in control of her own image. In control because she has to be, because if not she simply wouldn’t exist. Photography is thus our sharpest tool to contour our likeness. In the perfect light, from a particular angle, at a certain distance, you can become the girl you’ve only ever been allowed to look at. Cinch, tuck, click, consummate—the shutter as la petite mort, a brief orgasmic death embalming something realer. And it’s there, in the sharp edges of a photograph, that we keep proof of ourselves. A pinkprint of possibility, a receiver for that otherwise unintelligible song. 

Audition, 2024, as its name implies, represents a trial-run: Fern Cerezo stands before their camera, in their kitchen, with makeshift lighting and a fabric backdrop, contending with a lifelong antagonism to the frame. One of their two self-portraits on view, Cerezo—notorious amongst their friends for refusing to have their photo taken—faces the viewer dead-on from a damp, pregnable gaze. In Premiere, 2024, taken months later, Cerezo is in bloom. In a more relaxed contrapposto, covered almost foot to neck in a thrifted wedding gown, they stand in the same kitchen, with the same lighting, and a newfound self ownership. Not quite a binary switch, this diptych is a document of their own potency unlocked by the shutter’s release. For Cerezo, contrary to predictions, salvation has come in the shape of a camera.

Dotting the exhibition with sun-warmed vignettes, Chuy Medina’s triptych brings buoyancy to “Bad Girls.” At the heart of his work is an undying search. He’s excavating the healing feminine spirit, he shares, with a camera as magnifying glass. Two 2020 beach photos, Stevie and Devan, employ the compulsory voyeurism that Acero touched on with Stroke. In both photos the subjects are looking away: Stevie is caught in a moment of undress with her head turned, while Devan sunbasks with eyes closed. Martine and Dara, taken three years later, is more exalted. The subjects’ docile gazes dominate this image, aware of the camera’s frame, a clear benchmark of Medina’s confidence in the power of his own gaze. In tender moments of kinship he’s uncovering a magnetic forcefield, our mutual body-song sliding in harmony.

With “Bad Girls,” Diaz likens the camera to a corset or a high-heel: an object of feminine vigor that binds to reveal something more honest. Such is the potency of transsexual image-making. Without our Marilyns and stolen lipstick, could we have ever found ourselves—let alone one another—in this stark world? Diaz and her troupe make it clear: Before the monolith touched down on earth, before we built icons to sing it, our emboweled sound-maps would inexplicably draw us together. That ever-present tether at the heart of any diva’s reeling glitz, that feral loon-call guiding us home. A house so vividly pink it defies tragedy, a shoe so impossibly tall it demands stillness, a mother so unwavering in her patience. Fabulosity is our synesthetic sight-song, a homeward sonar, and in Diaz’s pink reliquary the volume is all the way up.

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‍“Bad Girls” is on view through December 8 at OCDChinatown at 75 East Broadway New York, NY 10002.