PANACEA
panacea | ˌpanəˈsēə | noun : a universal remedy.
Panacea is an exhibition open to the public February 4th-9th at Espace Transmission, that materializes transfeminine vitality through semi-living sculptural artifacts. The exhibition explores how bodies navigate and disrupt medical-industrial control, transforming biopolitical violence into a metabolis of care and transformation.
These forms breathe. Slowly. Neither alive nor dead, they occupy the space political systems refuse to name. The gap between pathology and personhood. Between procedural protocol and clandestine survival.
Medical institutions want clean categories. Diagnosis. Treatment. Resolution. Trans bodies shimmer between these states, impure, holding multiple truths. Glamour and monstrosity aren't opposites here, they're evolutionary strategies for survival that keep queer bodies alive when the system decides they shouldn't exist at all.
We are pleased to welcome you to the opening night on Thursday February 5th, which will include live musical compositions, sculptural forms, and poetic incantations.
In this septic era, we search for panacea, not an elixir but a practice. A love so permeant and radiant, it clings to the air, metabolizing this poison with every contraction of the heart. Light refuses to be dimmed or snuffed out.
Touch tours are available by appointment (30-45mins). This experience offers sensory exploration of the exhibition through touch, smell, and dialogue with the artist themself. Originally designed primarily for visually impaired audiences, we're extending this offering to all who seek a deeper, embodied encounter with the work which reveals itself most fully through direct physical engagement allowing the audience to come to grasp with works.
Vol D’Anges is a collective of artists deeply rooted in transfeminist thought. They wield their practices to disrupt cultural constructs of the body, gender, transformation, and power. Their work seeks to Deconstruct, Feminize, Regenerate, and remediate societies' structures of power and control. Through performance, installation, and digital media, they dissolve entrenched narratives, offering a vision of a society that is as bold as it is compassionate.
Growing Affinity: A THESIS-CREATION, TRANSFORMING THE BODY, TRANSFEMMININE WELL-BEING AND MATERIAL CULTURE
Growing Affinity investigates how medical technologies materialize transfeminine bodies within networks of representation, commodification, and violence through a research-creation practice that positions the studio as the primary research site. Drawing on embodied ethnography as a transfeminine artist and material knowledge of protein-based polymer transformations, this research examines the biomedical-industrial apparatus as a site where bodies are transformed, regulated, and embedded within commodity culture.
Through sculptures made from slaughterhouse-derived gelatin, the work materializes insights about transfeminine embodiment that cannot be accessed through text or interviews alone. By working with the same substance used in medical training simulators, ballistic testing, and commercial sex toys, the material practice reveals consumption pathways and extractive relationships that characterize both gender-affirming healthcare and industrial animal processing.
The gelatin-based sculptures appropriate anatomical simulators and sexual artifacts, transforming them into critical interventions on the consumption of feminized bodies. As these semi-living objects dry, contract, and develop microbial growths, they mirror the temporal and transformative nature of embodied transition. Through exhibition contexts and optional community dialogue, the research fosters new ways of understanding transfeminine bodies while critically examining the medical-industrial systems that shape them.
I call this series Dolls
The Dolls
Doll 1 _ Femme
Inspired by Louise Bourgeois's 2005 Bronze Sculptural work Femme, this piece engages with her introspective creative process, one rooted in her own cathartic revisitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Through personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois's oeuvre, employs a variety of genres, media, and materials, “playing” with her own powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.
The doll occupies a complex position in cultural imagination, simultaneously a toy, surrogate body, object of desire, and site of projected fantasy. Dolls are manufactured substitutes for human presence: toys for children, companions for the isolated, and sexualized objects for adult consumption. In appropriating the "Doll" as a form, I aim to engage with how feminized and particularly transgender bodies are positioned as similarly socially-constructed objects, designed for use, manipulation, and eventual disposal.
By encasing these forms in translucent hydrogel, these sculptures rot, weep, and transform, asserting their own material agency against the fantasy of the compliant object. The doll becomes a site where questions of use, value, violence, and care converge, where the boundary between subject and object remains deliberately, uncomfortably uncanny. Going even further, the "ballistic gelatin doll" is a forensic simulatory dummy used in weapons testing to simulate the impacts of harm. The doll's manufactured nature, its artificially mimetic flesh, its engineered proportions and suspended organs, mirror how trans bodies are often understood as unnatural constructions design for consumption rather than naturally embodied people.
Resin Scaffold. Biopolymer Hydrogel. Cochineal Husk.
6”x3”x3”
Doll 2 _ Fleshlight
This sculpture appropriates the form of a commercial masturbation sleeve, the Fleshlight, invented in 1995 by Steve Shubin, to interrogate how transgender bodies are reduced to objects of sexual consumption and penetrative fantasy. the Sleeve, cast in translucent hydrogel is mimetic, it’s flesh-like hole is still actively rotting, the work materializes the violence of objectification by transforming this discrete tool of fantastical consumption into a visible sculptural object for meditation.
By isolating and monumentalizing this device, I aim to question, how and why are bodies are imagined primarily as orifices? How does the visibility of sexual fantasy, construct, constrain and control sovereign transgender embodiment? The deliberate decay of the material disrupts the discreet, inert, subservient nature of the “sex object”. It’s terminal obsolescence negates the user from forming an emotional affinity, instead meant to be used in private, broken down, and discarded.
3d printed Resin Shell. Biopolymer Hydrogel Sleeve
8.75”x5.25”x5.25”
In ancient Egypt, the heart (ib) served as both physiological organ and material witness during ones judgment after death. not only was it physically preserved through mummification, hand-carved carnelian amulets were worn around the neck, functioning to avert evil influences, and reminding the wearer to practice love throughout life to ensure the deceased's heart would weigh less than a feather during a ceremonial weighing of the heart. the verdict, either granting access to Paradise, or condemnation to hell. Thereby materializing the convergence of anatomical necessity, moral agency, and cosmic order within portable protective artifact.
I’m called toward the heart because it's an organ that straddles the emotional and physiological life of an animal, a twisted engine, running even on empty. In this age where transfeminine bodies are endlessly ostracized, pathologized, and regulated by socio-cultural and biomedical-industrial systems, this understanding feels urgent, practicing love materially changes our composition. the care we share with others has an immeasurable weight, that tenderness is what determines whether we're granted passage or condemned. When institutions see us as neither fully alive nor productively dead, hypervisible as spectacle, invisible as people, love becomes a permeant force that metabolizes hate’s poison with every contraction of it’s chambers. It's not metaphor, its a way of surviving, that intimacy, devotion and care are what actually sustain our semi-living existence.
Doll 3 _ Ib
Resin Scaffold. Biopolymer Hydrogel. Cochineal Husk.
5.5”x3.9”x2”
Past works that inspired the “Growing Affinity” Thesis-Creation
is an offering dish filled with granules of my own dried blood, this work explores how transgender bodies exist in biological limbo, chemically castrated, caught between inherited narratives of reproduction and futurity. The granulated blood, dried, powdered and preserved, arrests this vital fluid into archival matter, establishing a corporeal record that circumvents normative generational cycles.
This material metamorphosis parallels my own bodily self-determination, disrupting and reconstituting anticipated biological continuities. Inspired by Bois Durci, the nineteenth-century pre-plastic composite that synthesized slaughterhouse blood with sawdust, the work acknowledges blood's industrial genealogy while reclaiming it as intimate creative substrate. Where Bois Durci transmuted biological detritus into decorative commodity, End of a Bloodline elevates bodily matter into speculative future making.
Human Blood (Dried), Pyrex
9”x3”x1”
End of a Bloodline (2022)
The work directly references the surgical transition procedure. This sculpture bears a replica cast of my own phallus in a cube of slowly decomposing Gelatine, cradled in glass and myco-foam packaging. By casting this void space at the center, I’m challenging phallocentric constructions of power and permanence. As the piece lives in the gallery, its open, wet surface captures the microbiome of the space.
Its human and non-human inhabitants, microbial and fungal bodies land on the decomposing material, metaphorically digesting society’s preconceived notions of sex and gender, and serving as a receptacle to metabolize cultural misconceptions about the body and (re)productivity. It’s soft architecture of decay, invites viewers to question these gendered assumptions, offering a building block towards a more diversified vision of society.
Gelatine, Water, Glass, Mycofoam
10”x10”x10”
PIV - Penile Inversion Vaginoplasty (2022)
369 tears for my stolen sisters (2018)In 2018, the TGEU issued a press release on Transgender Day of Remembrance, reporting 369 transphobically motivated murders executed globally throughout 2017, each digit representing a life extinguished by hate. This stark accounting falls short of capturing all cases worldwide, as many trans and gender-diverse murder victims are misidentified in autopsy reports, erasing their individuality, leaving them undocumented and permanently misgendered. These figures require nuanced interpretation within their racialized, social, political, economic, and historical contexts, particularly given the increasing visibility/fetishization of transgender individuals in the West and the varying levels of cultural acceptance globally. In response to this accounting,
I have collected 369 of my own tears, each preserved in microcentrifuge tubes —small plastic vessels used to suspend biological matter in time. What began as a methodical mourning practice, my grief expressed in saltwater transforms into something approaching the sacred, a burial rite. The precision of scientific preservation cradles the immeasurable weight of loss, creating a memorial that insists on reverence for our most vulnerable while exposing how little our society values transgender existence. We have always sought containers for our grief. The ancients filled lachrymatory vessels not with tears, as romantic myth would have it, but with perfumed oils for the dead, yet the misattribution persists because we need it. The Victorians elevated mourning to art form, crafting elaborate rituals around loss. These impulses reveal something essential: our desperate need to make the incorporeal corporeal, to hold what cannot be held. Though archaeology has debunked the tear-collecting vessels, their mythic power endures, a testament to our refusal to let sorrow remain only feeling, our insistence that grief, too, deserves preservation
Human Tears, Polypropylene, Glass
14”x3”x3”
Syphillus Plush
"Syphilis Plush" presents as a tactile bioinformatic sculpture—undulating polyester satin tubes adorned with pixelated patterns derived from the Treponema pallidum genome. This multidisciplinary work transcends conventional artistic boundaries, fusing digital technology with biological semiotics to interrogate human-microbial symbiosis. The sculpture's serpentine morphology, originally knotted but now liberated, invites physical engagement while challenging reductionist perspectives on living systems. Under laser illumination, the sculpture's fluid kineticism evokes microbial motility, transforming abstract genomic data into sensorial experience. This interactive quality facilitates a performative dialogue that parallels bacterial transmission and mutation, ultimately recontextualizing microbes from mere pathogens to essential constituents of our biological and cultural identity. The work eloquently crystallizes the intersection between computational representation and biological materiality, illuminating the complex entanglements between technological epistemologies and microbial ontologies.