PARTICIPANT INC is proud to open the season with Fuck Island, a major solo exhibition of new work by Kembra Pfahler. Fuck Island is a protest anthem, love song, and manifesto written for her band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. As Pfahler describes this song-as-exhibtion: “It’s the first annual Karen Black cock festival. But it’s really more like a happy funeral. We are celebrating the death of the patriarch, and you are all party to this secret.”

In her life’s work, exclusively characterized by interpretations of feminine archetypes, Pfahler is well-known for announcing that the vagina is “closed” by sewing hers shut, or by constructing physical “Walls of Vagina” that cannot be permeated. Fuck Island debuts a new vernacular of ‘future feminism’ that follows in a long yet contested tradition of feminist appropriation of the phallus. From Yayoi Kusama’s environments of flaccid dicks, to Lynda Benglis sporting a double dildo on the pages of Artforum, Pfahler extends this lineage of women’s endeavor to reclaim and subvert phallic imagery – inaugurating a shift with a “morbid interdisciplinary fine art surprise party.” Contesting apologist theorizing, she accentuates the ‘privileged signifier’ – here subsumed within the all-female imagery of Karen Black. As in the lyrics of the song, this repeating motif, Pfahler notes, “exists here as a way to manage the terror of imminent domain that underlies life in NYC — that size obfuscates and rules, destructively and illogically.”

Opening reception, Sunday, September 9, 7-9pm
With a one-song performance by The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black