arms ache avid aeon: fierce pussy amplified

Formed in New York City in 1991 through their immersion in AIDS activism during a decade of increasing mobilization around LGBTQ+ rights, fierce pussy brought lesbian identity and visibility directly into the streets. The collective used readily available resources: old typewriters, found photographs, their own baby pictures, and printers at their day jobs. Four core members continue to work together today, and their work is on view in arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified Chapter 7 organized by Jo-ey Tang at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Working across drawing, painting and sculpture, Nancy Brooks Brody’s work is non-representational, and more recently site-determined, engaging with architecture as well as the body.

Joy Episalla is an interdisciplinary artist whose work repositions photographic and moving image media into the territory of sculpture.

Carrie Yamaoka is a visual artist working with the transformational possibilities of form, perception, materiality and process.

Zoe Leonard is a visual artist working with photography, sculpture, and installation.

An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the appointment of Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ‘23 in Graz.