Exhibition

CP Projects Space at the School of Visual Arts presents “How to Be a Good Lover,” curated by MA Curatorial Practice student Kiera McIntosh. The exhibition operates within the pedagogical architecture of femininity through which the conditions of gendered desire are first encountered, rehearsed, and internalized. It traces the aftermath created by the formative systems of media, play, domestic space, and fantasy, which instructs girls on how to be legible, pleasing, and ultimately chosen. “How to Be a Good Lover” resists framing love, partnership, or femininity as natural or developmental milestones, positioning girlhood instead as a prolonged apprenticeship in anticipation, self-regulation, emotional labor, and the cultivation of desirability. Within this system, desire is externalized and is learned as something to be produced for others rather than articulated from within. As a result, to be “a good lover” becomes shorthand for a perfected performance of femininity, one that is nurturing, compliant, emotionally attuned, and endlessly accommodating.

The works gathered here draw on domestic objects and materials; the everyday artifacts through which feminine labor and care are both enacted and symbolized. Ellen Carpenter explores the overlapping terrains of the domestic interior and the body, revealing the contradictions embedded in spaces of care and emotional containment. Jillian FitzMaurice stages femininity as both mythic and estranged, situating her subjects within dreamlike encounters inflected by surrealism and the natural world. Lucia Gallipoli repurposes vintage textiles and ephemera to expose the labor of sentimentality, merging soft fantasy within the act of naval gazing. Ann Hirsch interrogates how digital platforms rehearse and commodify intimacy, addressing women's sexual self-expression and identity within online and popular culture. Yasmine Anlan Huang constructs polyphonic narratives moving across video, poetry, sculpture, and performance, tracing how coming-of-age desire collides with patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist frameworks. Clare Kramer confronts memory, trauma, and interpersonal violence through autobiographically inflected works that examine isolation as both wound and structure. Shelby Rahe reflects on the subtle coercions embedded in aesthetic, gender, and relational norms through video processes that foreground storytelling.

Sammy Semil works primarily within the physical inheritance of gendered emotional labor that occurs generationally to explore concepts of grief and loss. Flora Wilds interrogates the economies of women's work and the queering of minimalist sculptural traditions, collaborating with found textiles and gendered commodities to trouble the pace of capital and the politics of care. Beneath the disciplined surface that these works collectively examine runs a current of systemically sustained frustration. What has historically been pathologized as female madness is reframed as an inevitable response to irreconcilable demands. “How to Be a Good Lover” examines this fracture, holding space for the anger that accumulates in the gap between what is felt and what can be expressed, further imagining forms of desire that do not begin in anticipation or performance, but in self-articulation.

CP Projects Space, 132 West 21st Street, 10th floor, is open Monday through Friday, 10:00am – 6:00pm, and weekends by appointment