In a massive 6,000-square-foot commercial space, soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body, curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles, opens with “Thank God For Abortion” (2019) regalia by artist Viva Ruiz. The otherworldly costumes featured in the exhibition are reminiscent of superheroes and are the ultimate introduction to this world of bodily autonomy, personal narrative, and unabashed feminist expression. This 29-person group exhibition acts as a form of hope and resistance as well as a celebration of the body in all its forms.
These otherworldly costumes are the ultimate introduction to this world of bodily autonomy, personal narrative, and unabashed feminist expression
The body, as the central focus of soft weapons, appears in two primary ways: the grotesque and the glamorous. Body horror and body fantasy. The grotesque comes through in Courtney Cone’s fleshy, amorphous sculptures, which rest on, slump under, or hang over crude tables. One wears stockings, ripped at the crotch; hair comes out of another’s orifice. Inspired by her experience of incarceration, the pieces look bruised and alien, yet human enough to trigger a visceral response. Anna Ting Möller’s “Bone 1, Bone 2” (2024) resembles bones wrapped in skin stitched taut; the “skin” is made of the kombucha scoby central to her practice. Another iteration of the scoby, “Peril” (2023), hangs across the gallery like drying cured meat. In Möller’s hands, the scoby, or “mother,” takes on a corporeal form, forming a bacterial maternal lineage. Abjection and the grotesque as feminist motifs make visible the way the body has long been a site of pain and trauma, both personal and systematic, questioning the boundaries of the body and the dichotomies of human/inhuman. In that exploration, an expression of autonomy emerges.
Lydia Nobles’ “Pleasure Trophy III” (2025) extends this thread of the grotesque. Fleshy yet oceanic, it takes a shell-like form. Holes spatter its surface like barnacles. Nobles moves further from the human form, yet her sculptures hold the anxieties, stickiness, and discomfort of embodied experience. “Elizabeth” (2025), from her As I Sit Waiting series, inspired by abortion stories and the clinic waiting-room chair, resembles an iris, a cow skull, and a human pelvis with the base of a rocking chair.
On the other side, artists like Aaron Cobett present the queer body polished, sensual, and gloriously unapologetic—an entry into the show’s body fantasies. His photographs depict queer subjects subverting gender norms with confidence and glamour. In “Hollywood” (1996), the model meets the camera’s gaze head-on, wearing a skin-tight one-piece. Leaning back, his arm rests on a glittering disco ball like a football player sitting with his helmet. “Andrea” (1998) perches nude atop a hot pink chaise, save for a studded collar. She, too, stares into the camera without a trace of shame. These are beautiful photos of beautiful people—a fantastical depiction of the bodies that were so often politicized. Glamour becomes the mode of resistance.
Chris Cortez’s “Inmaculada Concepción” puts forth a similarly lush fantasy. In this smooth and rich self-portrait, Cortez casts their own body as the Virgin Mary, reimagining both religious narratives and reproductive possibility. If Mary can immaculately conceive, why can’t any other kind of body? The body becomes a generative realm theoretically and literally as the subject is pregnant with a new being—one with blue eyeshadow matching their own.
Darryl LaVare’s portraits sit somewhere between the grotesque and the fantastical. They are unpolished depictions of friends and figures from the Lower East Side scene that maintain a dream-like beauty, tilting toward caricature without ever mocking their subjects. In “Taboo! In the Studio” (2025), Taboo!, in full drag, makes perfect sense in the colorful and busy background and LaVare’s style.
The exhibition also explores the effects of modern technology on the body and choice, highlighting the complexities that can occur as women use technology to share their experiences or seek information.
Multidisciplinary artist Aneesa Julmice directly addresses these themes in a series titled Parasocial, in which she explores what it means to have an online presence through the lens of the female form. In “The Trinity” (2025), a polished, classical interior finished with ornate molding and striped walls is starkly contrasted by two large surveillance cameras. The surreal scene is executed with precision. The mirror, a symbol of self-reflection, is flanked by the cameras, representing external observation. The work is a haunting meditation on visibility, surveillance, and identity– a place where sacred space and technology collide, leaving only traces of the self behind.
“Doxxed” (2025) is a digital interactive installation depicting four figures in a similarly eerie and sterile setting. In a pristine, high-ceilinged room, the women’s poses are reminiscent of Renaissance nudes, but black glossy latex masks enforce anonymity. At the center lies a shattered flat-screen television. The work speaks to the fetishization and erasure Black and brown women have long faced in the media, asking what remains of identity and autonomy when the digital gaze claims ownership of one’s body.
The show neither slips into hopelessness nor offers naive optimism; it acknowledges the weight of the political and cultural moment and encourages you to keep going.
These commentaries are juxtaposed with poignant personal narratives and self-expression. Morgan Cousins’s “Dear Mother Series” (2014–2025) is a powerful sequence of 9 self-portraits documenting her experience having an abortion in her parents’ homeland of Jamaica. By telling her own story, she connects to the women who came before her while also honoring those who have lost their lives to unsafe abortions.
Independently produced and curated, soft weapons is an inspiring achievement, and the themes it sets out to tackle are no less ambitious. In exploring the politicized body, relationships, and collective memory, it highlights a tapestry of stories that attests to creative expression’s transformative potential. The show neither slips into hopelessness nor offers naive optimism; it acknowledges the weight of the political and cultural moment and encourages you to keep going. soft weapons challenges the cynic in all of us. After experiencing the show, the mannequins in Viva Ruiz’s “Thank God for Abortion” regalia bid you goodbye as you leave the world that soft weapons created.
All images courtesy of soft weapons.
