Laugh Back

Laugh Back
Curated by Lindsey O’Connor

July 14-August 19, 2018
Opening Reception: July 14, 6-8pm

Participating Artists: Farah Al Qasimi, Natalie Baxter, Deborah Castillo, Kristina Davis, Dynasty Handbag,
Jesse Harrod, INNER COURSE (Rya Kleinpeter and Tora López), Lady Parts Justice League’s Vagical Mystery
Tour, Jen Liu, Rachel Mason, Jan Mun, Luis Mejico, Madhini Nirmal, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Katherine
Simóne Reynolds, Andréa Stanislav

Smack Mellon is pleased to present Laugh Back, a group exhibition that probes the transgressive potential
of laughter to threaten authority. In an increasingly tense political landscape, laughing is an everyday gesture
capable of unsettling norms, subverting power, and challenging dominant systems. Laugh Back focuses on the
diverse cultural production of artists who engage the defiant possibilities of humor, satire, and the absurd as
subversive tools for cultural change.
Focusing specifically on the practices of self-identifying women, Laugh Back reframes the trope of humorless
feminist resistance by emphasizing deployments of the absurd that disrupt presumed stable discourses.
Speaking directly to the contemporary sociopolitical climate, the works in Laugh Back examine gender, race,
politics, and labor from multicultural perspectives to uncover a current, uniquely feminist brand of humor that is
an increasingly threatened and threatening vehicle to speak truth to power.
In works that question and queer antiquated notions of gender, historically engrained myths and definitions
are overturned while neat representations are problematized. Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs capture women
Image: Jen Liu, still from Pink Slime Caesar Shift, 2018. Single-channel 4K video, two-channel audio; 24:20 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam
Laugh Back
Curated by Lindsey O’Connor
July 14–August 19, 2018
Opening Reception: July 14, 6-8 PM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
92 Plymouth Street @ Washington Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Tel: 718.834.8761 | smackmellon.org | Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm
Contact: Jessica Holburn, jholburn@smackmellon.org
smackmellon.org | @smackmellon
in domestic settings and grapple with the lingering effects of colonialism on Gulf Arab bodies. Meanwhile,
Luis Mejico’s text-based works convey the artist’s dysmorphia toward her transgender body and question
the rigid gender categories projected onto diverse physicalities. In a turn, Jesse Harrod engages the legacy
of swimmer and 1940s movie star Esther Williams, uncovering Williams’s dual status as both a wholesome
American icon and an LGBTQIA sex symbol. The collaborative duo INNER COURSE recreates a version
of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s bedroom from the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy in a performative installation that
functions as a library of pseudoscientific and predatory self-help books written for women. Finally, Andréa
Stanislav creates a memorial to real and fictional men whose identities are inextricable from gross displays of
masculinity. Utilizing humor both subtly and overtly, the artists in question mine diverse histories in order to call
into question embedded gender stereotypes.
Other artists offer searing critiques of racial bias in works that throw systemic inequality into sharp relief.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s collection of aphoristic, alliterative statements calls attention to racial injustice,
political corruption, and pervasive apathy as aspects of larger societal malady in absurd combinations of text.
In uncanny videos, Katherine Simóne Reynolds exposes the impacts of structural racism on Saint Louis’s
social and physical landscapes, examining the everyday microaggressions inflicted upon people of color. Both
artists employ a brand of sardonic humor in an effort to confront uncomfortable truths head-on.
A number of artists reckon with the contemporary political landscape both nationally and abroad in works
that utilize dark comedy and wry humor. Natalie Baxter’s massive, flaccid American flag is a comment on
the divided and discordant nature of political ideology in our current cultural climate. In an aggressive and
grotesque makeup tutorial, Dynasty Handbag laments the crumbling façade of liberalism and prepares her
physical self for conservative backlash. Meanwhile, in an ominous and unsettling video, Rachel Mason’s
avatar FutureClown lip-syncs Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. Deborah Castillo’s performance in which
she mauls two clay, male busts mocks misogyny, colonialism, and totalitarianism more universally. In addition,
Madhini Nirmal reenvisions her hometown of Chennai, India as a subversive playground in which mischievous
goats undermine oppressive political and caste systems. In each instance, these artists engage laughter to
create a topsy-turvy space in which exchanges of power are unsettled.
Finally, a selection of works examines women’s fundamental relationship to labor and economics. Jan Mun’s
interactive project considers the lived experiences of women working in the direct line of secondary trauma
and identifies laughter as a key survival tactic. In an installation of appropriated texts, Kristina Davis collages
diverse voices from women working at the intersections of sex work, feminism, and queer theory. Lastly, Jen
Liu considers the lived realities of women Special Economic Zone factory workers living in China in a film
that also functions as a proposal to use genetically altered meat as a vehicle to covertly transmit messages of
labor insurrection. These artists recognize women’s labor as a fundamental aspect of the formal and informal
international economy while considering the challenges facing specific populations of working women.
The artists in Laugh Back utilize various comedic genres to create a symbolic space for transformation in which
structures of power and repression are recognized and confronted. These women use humor as a means to
upset, if only for a visceral moment, established ways of being.

Lindsey O’Connor is an exhibition organizer and arts writer living in New York City. She is currently
the Biennial Co-Coordinator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has held past positions at the
Guggenheim Museum, American Federation of Arts, and Biennial of the Americas. She has curated and cocurated
exhibitions with Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, South Africa, and the NLE Curatorial Lab in New
York. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, CAA.Reviews, Art Papers, and Ada: Journal of Gender,
New Media, and Technology.