PARTICIPANT INC is delighted to welcome Vaginal Davis back to New York City for her first major solo visual art exhibition, HAG–small, contemporary, haggard. The name HAG in part refers to a subset within the Queercore movement of the eighties, which reclaimed the negative connotations associated with the term HAG. The croan, the skank, the slattern, the fag hag, and the veritable sea hag all took on new states of exaltation within this movement. Although HAG had proponents on both coasts, it was more active in Los Angeles, where Ms. Davis was hatched.

This exhibition is in tribute to and inspired by the original HAG Gallery (1982-1989), which Ms. Davis opened at 7850 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, California. The new, botoxed HAG will function as a fractured gallery within the space of PARTICIPANT INC. As Davis puts it, “my medium is the indefinite nature of my own whimsy.” HAG will feature new work that Davis has made while living in the Rote Insel section of Berlin, including her signature cosmetics-and-tempera paintings of women trapped in the bodies of women, lesbian domesticity wallpaper collages, and totemic bread sculpture, which Davis describes as Rapa Nui Moai monuments vs. the Venus of Willendorf.