Curated by
July 11, 2025
-
August 6, 2025
Judy Giera
Curated by Noam Parness
Opening Reception: Friday, July 11, 6:00-8:00pm
NARS Main Gallery
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Devastating, a solo exhibition by artist Judy Giera, curated by Noam Parness.
Devastating presents a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by the artist Judy Giera. Known for her mixed-media, theatrical and textured works, Giera’s latest paintings and sculptures present flesh as fragmented and malleable, rendering new forms as old as time: fluorescent breasts, thighs, and vaginas vibrate, shimmer, and drip, emerging from deep recesses. Pleasure, sustenance, horror, and beauty intertwine in Giera’s fantastic, feminine figures. In recent sculptures, mirrors, vanities, and fountains are refigured in fiberglass to new heights. These portals for reflection and narcissistic beauty not only emerge as self-portraits, but, by virtue of their former functionality, demand a reorientation of one’s own body when encountering them. The artist thus offers new corporeal orders, requesting that we indulge ourselves in her world of continuous adaptation.
Looking to the wisdom of the hit TV-series The Golden Girls, this exhibition takes its title from the words of Blanche Deveraux: “I guess it’s the curse of being a devastatingly beautiful woman.” Following Deveraux’s lead, Giera’s works explore the polysemy of “devastating” womanhood, acknowledging the vitality and beauty of feminine embodiment, while also critiquing its prescriptive assumptions and representations. Her work reclaims the weird in all its wonder and possibility: an aesthetic where Lisa Frank meets Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.” For the artist, humor and joy serve as an antidote to the ever increasing demands of patriarchy and the terrors of our current political landscape. As her works take shape, endless possibilities emerge for gendered embodiment that glimmer beyond societal norms.
About the artist:
Judy Giera is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist and arts worker. She has presented solo exhibitions with SPANTZO, Waterloo Arts Center, haul gallery, and a forthcoming summer 2025 exhibition with NARS Foundation. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at The Hudson River Museum, Bronx Arts Space, Trestle Gallery, The Elizabeth Foundation, Gallery Aferro, among others. Judy was a 2022 AIM Fellow with the Bronx Museum of the Arts and her work was included in Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial at the museum in 2024. Giera was awarded the Davyd Whaley Scholarship at the Art Students League of New York and has participated in residency programs with SVA, NYC Crit Club/Plum Line Residency, The Potato Farm Project/North Fork, NY, and forthcoming with ChaShaMa/Cha North. Judy holds an MFA in Art from Lehman College (CUNY), an MFA in Theatre from Pace University and spent a year doing graduate coursework in Performance Studies at Pratt Institute. In addition to her art practice, Judy is the Associate Director of Collections for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, overseeing the museum’s collection of over 25,000 objects. She resides in Brooklyn with her wife, two cats, and a large collection of houseplants.
About the curator:
Noam Parness is a curator, writer, and arts administrator with a focus on queer art and life. Select past curatorial projects include Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant (co-curated with Jackson Davidow, 2023-2025), I’m a thousand different people—Every one is real (co-curated with Stamatina Gregory and Judy Giera, 2024), Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection (co-curated with Ariel Goldberg, 2020), and Haptic Tactics (co-curated with Risa Puleo and Daniel J Sander, 2018). They edited, with Gonzalo Casals, Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection (Hirmer Publishers, 2019). They currently work as a Senior Exhibitions Coordinator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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