In Us is Heaven | Group Exhibition
Southern Guild is pleased to present 'In Us is Heaven', an extensive group exhibition by interdisciplinary artists from Africa and North America at its gallery in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles, opening 16 May.
Negotiating heterogenous experiences and aesthetics, the exhibition’s works contend that Queer art is not marginal or other–it is everywhere, existing and persisting in the intersections of our cultural, political, spiritual and emotional landscapes.
'In Us is Heaven' serves as both sanctuary and site of confrontation. Running concurrently with Zanele Muholi’s 'Faces and Phases 19', which marks the geographic expansion of the visual activist’s seminal portraiture project, 'In Us is Heaven' questions systems of regulation that enforce difference, shame and social failure, advocating for healing through the infinite resource of unbounded love.
Featured artists include Queezy Babaz, Jody Brand, Chloe Chiasson, Lea Colombo, Simon Haas, Alex Hedison, Rich Mnisi, Zanele Muholi, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Oluseye, Catherine Opie, Araba Opoku, Jody Paulsen, Athi-Patra Ruga, Brett Charles Seiler, Chiffon Thomas and Qualeasha Wood.
The exhibition embraces Cuban-American scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s proposition that “Queer utopia” exists in the now as a possible but not-yet-reached horizon.
Zanele Muholi | LiZa I | 2009
'In Us is Heaven' explores the fluid contours of Queer being not only as lived experience but as a visionary realm where personhood and autonomy are reimagined beyond the binary confines of heteropatriarchy, normative function, nationalism, and coloniality.
Zanele Muholi | Miss Lesbian I, Amsterdam | 2009
Brett Charles Seiler’s 'Rainbow Flag' mural, painted on the gallery’s external street-facing wall, reflects the collective sentiment of the Queer community this Pride Month.
Zanele Muholi | Mahone, Durban | 2021
Drained of its usual vibrancy – the gay pride colours signified only through text – Seiler’s desaturated iteration speaks to the loss, grief and uncertainty faced by the LGBTQIA+ community.
Araba Opoku | Doors, Gates, Portals | 2025
The predominant presence of photography, as both documentary and speculative form, serves here as a mode of reclamation. The early 20th century saw the medium weaponised against the Queer community through surveillance, police records, and psychiatric documentation.
Athi-Patra Ruga | Jacob About to Wrestle an Angel | 2021
In response, artists and activists sought to image themselves in love, protest, joy and camaraderie, offering personal counter-narratives to mainstream erasure and the proliferation of reductive images of Queer life.
Athi-Patra Ruga | Swazi Youth After | 2019
Catherine Opie’s 'Portraits' series (1993–1997) destabilizes the nostalgic trope of the all-American family portrait, presenting members of Los Angeles and San Francisco’s lesbian, gay, Trans, and sadomasochistic communities in studio settings.
Athi-Patra Ruga | Swazi Youth After | 2019 (detail)
Opie’s photographs reject the portrait format’s associations with heterosexuality, capitalist values and traditional gender roles, manifesting an intimate vision of partnerships built on chosen kinship, survival and unflinching erotic solidarity.
Catherine Opie | Mike and Sky 2 | 1994
Though the practices of Opie and Zanele Muholi are location specific, they are not location bound. Both artists have cultivated aesthetic environments for collective belonging and counter-hegemonic representation, developing transnational archives for multiplicitous self-identification.
Catherine Opie | Daddy Irwin and Mark | 1994
The devotional portrait is further reimagined in Brett Charles Seiler’s large-scale painting, 'Shakil and Laura (To Rub Hurt Feelings)', a cinematic window into the community of friends, chosen family, lovers and former lovers that animate his world.
Brett Seiler | Shakil and Laura (Help to Rub Hurt Feelings) | 2025
The intimate corners of the artist’s life unfold in this studio scene in which a man and a woman – friends of one another and of Seiler – pose for their portrait, surrounded by paintings, erotic studies, preparatory sketches and photographs of other friend-models.
Brett Seiler | Rainbow Flag | 2024
The soft resistance of everyday bonds – casual, deep, physical, platonic – are the subject here as Seiler’s practice pivots around grace, vulnerability, peoplehood, and love.
Queezy Babaz | Midnight Satin | 2024
Simon Haas’ graphite drawing distills a personal moment of this same togetherness. Haas’ rendering captures his husband and two beloved friends swimming against the shifting tides off New York’s Fire Island – a storied stretch of coastline long cherished as a haven for the local gay community.
Lea Colombo | Rotation of Self | 2021
A growing body of decolonial and African feminist scholarship interrogates the imposition and legacy of Western gender binaries on African societies, revealing these as central – rather than peripheral – consequences of colonial rule and Christian missionary activity.
Lea Colombo | Seeing Beyond, Pyramid Self | 2024
Works by Oluseye and Athi-Patra Ruga speak back to doctrine by restaging the ornate artifice of biblical narrative. Oluseye’s Steve photographic series – whose title is an arched reference to the homophobic adage “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” – depicts the artist enacting a ritual of unlearning and reconstitution.
Jody Paulsen | Venus as a Regular Girl | 2023
Individually titled 'The Fall of Man (Sin), Act of Contrition (Shame), The Revelation (Self-acceptance)', the self-portraits confront colonial Christianity’s violent history while reclaiming Queer embodiment as divine.
Rich Mnisi | Rifuwo (Wealth) | 2023
Ruga’s hallucinatory tapestry, 'Jacob About to Wrestle an Angel', sees the artist render himself in the image of Senegalese Cabaret dancer Féral Benga. Striking a pose of come-hither provocation, Ruga’s figure is without male or female genitalia.
Rich Mnisi | Matimba (Strength) Photographer: Aart Verrips | 2023
This withholding interrogates the racialised and gendered economies of desire, calling keen attention to the phallus as a site of both fixation and critique. Drawing on African traditions, camp aesthetics and the expansive history of fetish culture, Ruga’s works offer us a flamboyant glimpse into the artist’s self-devised pantheon of Queer saints and mythological avatars.
Chloe Chiasson | Cowboy in Love | 2024
Gender as social performance – in all its learnt custom and codified gesture – occupies a central thematic throughline.
Chloe Chiasson | Saving Grace | 2023
Both Muholi and Queezy Babaz celebrate Queer pageantry, drawing from their own personal histories. Muholi’s 'Miss Lesbian I, Amsterdam' is a nod to Ms Sappho, a pageant for Black Queer women held in South Africa in the late ’90s in which the artist themself participated 28 years ago.
Qualeasha Wood | i believe there’s meaning / i believe there’s nothing | 2024
The portrait has retained its radical value, emblematic of Muholi’s world-building impulse to image and illuminate alternative lesbian and non-binary corporality. Queezy’s kaleidoscopic digital print interweaves family photographs with archival images from Miss Gay Western Cape, an ongoing Cape Town-based pageant first held in 1996.
Ambrose Rhapsody Murray | 'Cross roads | 2024
The artist regards the work as an extension of drag performance – a ritualised spectacle of performing the self – referencing different aspects of their identity and heritage: indigenous (Khoi and San) cosmologies, Queer rites of passage, contrasting cultural styles and belief systems.
Alex Hedison | Untitled #8 (Nowhere) | 2012
Gender as performance requires the symbiotic gaze of another, made real through the awareness of being perceived. The exaltation of the human form is explored in the work of Rich Mnisi, Lea Colombo, Jody Paulsen and Jody Brand.
Oluseye | Steve, Act I: The Fall of Man | 2019
The hyper-masculine bodybuilder in Mnisi’s 'Matimba (Strength)', speaks to cultures of body conditioning within gay communities, where the body becomes either a signifying trophy or a territory for scrutiny.
Oluseye | Steve, Act II: Act of Contrition | 2019
Beyond this internalised consciousness of being seen, Mnisi conjures the vulnerability and plurality of all masculinities, gestured in the closed eyes of his otherwise hardened subject.
Oluseye | Steve, Act III: Revelations | 2019
Paulsen also toys with notions of excess in a sumptuous felt collage that reimagines Titian’s 'Venus of Urbino' as a “regular girl” surrounded by the accoutrements of privileged womanhood.
Oluseye The value of my dreams will not drown me, Edition 20 of 48 | 2023
The material opulence, the almost palpable self-indulgence, embody a campified femininity that Paulsen implies is both aspirational and repellent.
Oluseye The value of my dreams will not drown me, Edition 23 of 48 | 2023
In Colombo’s photographic self-portraits, the body is arranged in artful compositions framed by elements including sacred geometry, colour and reflected light. Approaching the female figure as a study in abstract form, her intervention invites us to consider its metaphysical aspects and the interrelation between matter and spiritual energy.
Simon Haas | Nautilus Walk | 2025
Brand builds a photographic altar to Black, Queer resilience in a portrait series that reconfigures the visual cues of domination
Chiffon Thomas | Untitled | 2024
Envisioning the multiverse of experiences and complex personhood of her collaborators (including fellow artist Queezy Babaz), she disrupts homogenous tropes of victimhood and trauma around the lives of femme individuals who exist outside of the centres of power.
Jody Brand | I was here | 2017
The series pays tribute to Nokuphila Khumalo, a 23-year-old South-African sex worker, murdered in 2013 by a well-known South African artist-photographer.
Jody Brand | Moffie in Irma's Garden | 2016
The works of Ambrose Rhapsody Murray and Chloe Chiasson disrupt the symbol of another trophy of American machismo. In the retro-terrain of the American South, the car is a vehicle for boyhood memory, familial mythologies and aspirational commodity.
Jody Brand | I Own Everything | 2017
While Murray’s fractured rendering of the car collapses and blends generational memory with their own sense of longing and reinvention, Chiasson’s sculptural imagining of the trunk of a pickup truck – strewn with emblems of Southern masculinity like Shiner beer and Marlboro Reds – becomes a podium for a lesbian embrace.
The oversized scale of both works declare a desire to occupy space, to disintegrate the tension between our private worlds and the surveilled public domain.
As public spaces regress into systematically policed spheres for gender non-conforming persons, Qualeasha Wood and Araba Opoku nurture speculative, abstract realms for creation and identity formation.
Wood interlaces tapestry with avatar and code, citing the virtual world and internet culture as a familiar, adolescent plane for digital play and autonomous self-imaging.
'i believe there’s meaning / i believe there’s nothing' epicts the artist clad in a t-shirt bearing the American flag and crowned by a Sims diamond, her avatar standing as both shield and surrogate in navigating virtual possibility and the real-world precarity of the current political climate.
Opoku’s meditative dreamscape, realised through fluid and repetitive mark-making, considers the psyche a portal where healing, failure and transformation coexist. Opoku finds spiritual architecture in intuitive form and pattern, building layered worlds that resist linear temporalities and fixed identity.
José Esteban Muñoz’s vision of Queer futurity is seemingly spied in Alex Hedison’s 'Untitled #8'. Between the thin obfuscation of two silhouetted curtains, a liminal parting reveals a glimpse of technicolour glow. It is toward this visible threshold, this Queered elsewhere, that 'In Us is Heaven' tenderly reaches.
Coinciding with Los Angeles’ Pride Month, the exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of talks and events featuring artists, curators and the broader Queer community.
