Mae Howard: between the skin and flesh, a thing[1]

In Mae Howard’s inaugural solo show, the objects on display invite visitors to consider: How can ritualized pain and pleasure, reckoning with hauntological skin and flesh stories, offer a means of interdependent relation?

Working with a collective of leather practitioners for over five years, Howard exhibits a series of hides printed with photographs documenting BDSM scenes in which they are both subject and co-author, keeping at the center the collaborative processes that produced the stills. These relational authorships reshape notions of kin and interdependence. Wielding sutures and scalpels—instruments repurposed from medical contexts—collaborators M. Celeste, Fluent, and Jess Dayan move in and out of the images as gloved hands, strict boots, and as architects of the predicaments that contain Howard’s form. Tops take turns behind the camera; photographers and present witnesses Gabriella N. Báez and blue are active contributors to the ritual interventions that challenge and reshape Howard’s flesh and spirit. Refuting the idea of individual authorship, Howard offers their body and the stewardship of it as an intermutual project, seemingly saying: this body is all of ours, we share in its responsibility.