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Artists
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So Fragile (Proddy in the Potty)
15.02.2025 – 29.03.2025
In the gallery’s project space, Potty, find Proddy (aka Produzentin), the Toronto-based avant-garde drag entity celebrated for co-founding the legendary Hotnuts dance parties with Mary Messhausen in 2006, and now regularly performing around the globe at German artist Cosima von Bonin’s exhibition openings. Produzentin is a great fan and connoisseuse of film noir who has staged – with Chris Curreri manning the camera – via photograph and sculptures an enigmatic mini-narrative here around a dolled-up protagonist (Produzentin herself) being menacingly offered a glass of milk by a shadowy male figure. Rather than a symbol of purity and nutrition, in the striking black-and-white photograph Yes, She’s Really That Old the glass of milk takes on an ominous cast, an elaborate re-enactment referencing an infamous scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 Suspicion featuring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine (where the white liquid glowed from a light hidden inside the glass). Proddy’s rosy-cheeked, bearded heroine – perversely somehow both child and adult – is caught in a decisive moment: whether to drink the potentially poisoned milk or to refuse it. The image is accompanied in the bathroom by a prescription pill bottle from one “Dr. Schlummly,” which only serves to deepen the mystery. As Produzentin hauntingly confessed to me, “there is darkness in the milk.” Indeed, appearances are bound to deceive and the things that seem most innocent on the surface often have the most to hide. Perhaps a certain suspicion and wariness is the most sensible approach to the world at the moment. The sensual sculpture that sits in the gallery’s bathtub, meanwhile, was fabricated from multiple ostrich eggs, and opens itself up to a range of polymorphous interpretations: from oversize pill to butt plug, ceramic vase to caterpillar. Its fatiguing title: There was a lot of pressing. Was this even helping? Sighing. Pressing. Sighing. Suddenly, with one big swoop, the discomfort turned into content. It was out and about. Was this the best thing since sliced bread? Oh so fragile. Then again, no one had to re-invent the egg. It had already been done. Produzetin’s entire mise-en-scène in So Fragile (Proddy in the Potty) is charged with a camp eroticism and a deeply sincere love for fetishistic detail, for intrigue and secrets.
– Jon Davies
Inkjet print, artist’s frame.
Ed of 3 + 1 AP
42.5 x 57 cm
Pill bottle, label.
Ed of 10 + 2 AP
4 x 7 x 3 cm
Ostrich egg, epoxy.
10.5 x 25 x 12 cm