ICING, an all-femme group exhibition centering networks of sisterhood and queer ecologies of the imagination, opens this coming Thursday in Queens. Elevating media historically situated as ‘women’s work,’ nature-based practices and feminine aesthetics to ‘high’ (as in, otherworldly) art, works in the exhibition span a range of mediums from oil painting, to digital photography, to new and mixed media.
Imagine a technicolor fairy dreamscape draped with faux fur and glitter lace, strewn with mirrors of intimacy, whimsy, and gargantuan elegance. Paper mâché blossoms crawl the walls, coexisting with disruptive meaning-making and the politics of burning desire. Blurring the lines between artifice, aesthetic-fashion, and absurdity in unapologetic homage to femme camp, as if to prove there’s nothing inherently superficial, nor submissive, about feminine adornment. Delicate or defanged? Buxom or Born Free? Like the icing on a towering cake, these curated objects d’art reclaim feminine aesthetics, from posturing to poise, potentiality to reinvention, caricature to containment and cataclysm.
Whether scrying subtly from the fringes or floating by on lavender clouds of fancy, as if dripping down from dangerously sleek stripper heels, like droplets of glistening sweat, five femme artists unleashed take to the white box gallery space, provoking envy and defying categorization. Rooting down in playful acts of fluid, deliberate bodily sovereignty, ICING’s bold intersectional feminist cohort speaks to and through cultures of care, multi-species ecologies, nature spirits, fairy lore, sex/work, storytelling, glitch feminist techno-futures, and AfroFuturist multidimensional frequencies.
In Traci Johnson’s narrative-rich textile works, we observe the artist’s ‘soft subversion’ ala immersive tactile installations in homage to the legacies of AfriCOBRA, Afrofuturism, and queer liberation. Transforming the traditional language of sanctuary, Johnson’s rugs of rainbow signify a path of selfhood at the intersection of public space, multidimensional healing, and community solidarity.
Amidst Carol Anne McFarlane’s live encounters with the male gaze – its immediacy, violence, and normalization – we find a glitch-driven feminist visual language anchored in self-preservation and feminine subjectivity. Veritably cracking open the Jezebel stereotype, McFarlane scrambles (internalized) performative identities as a medium, splicing and dicing dominant cultural codes into a brutal vortex of critical visibility and cross-examination. Interrogating the Black female body “as a contested site of projection, control and possibility,” Carol Anne “Da Baddest Bytch” McFarlane dismantles inherited scripts – claiming refusal, distortion and opacity as a generative strategy.
Follow the artist on IG @camcfarlane
Brooklyn-based paper funk and performance artist ama of MetallicFern transmutes crepe paper and paper mâché into large-scale botanical sculptures she brings to life with performative somatic. An ode to the enduring vitality of foliage, many know her as the creatrix of three permanent installations on Madison in Manhattan, on display since 2021.
Follow the artist IG @metallicfern
With wide-ranging and otherworldly influences, including concepts such as ritual and reincarnation, processes of organic decomposition, work with the mentally ill, and her personal maternal ancestral lineage rooted in Korean Shamanism, Adehla Lee paints large-scale, feminine, figurative oil-on-canvas works. Gripped by afterlife curiosity, ensconced with karmic social-emotional residues, Lee’s works serve visual pleasure and psychological intimidation in one, courting hungry ghosts at the threshold of fantasy, matricide, and magical women.
Interdisciplinary digital-media maven, Dakota Gearhart, combines writing, performance, special effects, photography, and drawing to operationalize non-hierarchical multi-species futures. Probing trans-human tensions at the intersection of environmental collapse, technocracy and biological desire, Gearhart’s uncanny multimedia sculptural installations employ transformative, science-fiction storytelling and raw repurposed materials to dissect oppressive modes of conditioning inherent to the given social matrix of class, gender, and species hierarchies.
Follow the artist on IG @_dakotagearhart
Amelia Marzec is an American artist engaging with communications infrastructure to inform a speculative future. From leveraging open-source technology to decrying land use and environmental toxins, Marzec’s carnivalesque embodiments, socially-engaged networks, micro-climate studies, and animist leanings make her a thought-leader within the space of emerging queer ecologies.
ICING
May 15- June 3rd, 2026
CIA Gallery 1108 Cypress Ave. Ridgewood, Queens
Opening Reception Thursday May 14, 6-9pm
Live performance by ama of MetallicFern
Featured Artists
Curated by Katie Cercone
About CIA Gallery
CIA Gallery [the center for information alternatives gallery] is an artist-run space in
New York City.
Curatorial Board
See the CIA website for open calls and opportunities to become and artist member
