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Dream, Desire, Despair

I scrub myself until my skin is raw

Maddy Young, Patrick Stochmal, Wu Jing

November 15, 2025 - January 10, 2026

Essay by Mason Smart

Saturday, November 15, 2025–Saturday, January 10, 2026

Opening reception: Friday, November 14, 2025 from 7pm–10pm

 

The bathroom is a site of duplicity. It configures fantasies to be realized that, once undertaken, reveal barriers endemic to the flourishing of these fantasies. Desires of purity, care and sustenance drain into despair as promises of self-actualization go unfulfilled. Slick surfaces
illuminate dreams of attaining a subjectivity that can be made discernible to itself; a coherent self to be maintained and optimized. Structuring rhythms of consumption and loss, absorption and expulsion, tenderness and revulsion, the ostensibly private space of the bathroom unfurls as a site of ruptures, exposing hidden infrastructures of discipline and control complacent in the maintenance of everyday life.