California Gothic: A FInal Girl
Emji Saint Spero
“You’re missing out,” Pau texts me, followed by a mirror selfie from Dolls Nite. In the photo she’s wearing a Scream mask and is tied up shibari-style in red rope. She let the Dolls tie her up even though she’s not really into that sort of thing, she tells me.
Pau brings the Dolls together on Tuesday nights after her day job, her apartment filled with escalating laughter and the oversharing shrieks of trans femmes. She curates this space for us outside the public gaze, where, less visible, we can be seen, where we can shed our practiced hypervigilance, at least temporarily. It’s a kiki, intimate and welcoming, less catty than I’m used to, with detours into absurdity, and yes, I’m missing it.
In the selfie, Pau is framed by a hallway covered in Bazic-bright sticker-dots, the office-supply kind. Her whole body is visible in the shot, her face obscured. She’s recognizable anyway. Her curls spill out from beneath the hood of the Scream mask. I keep coming back to this image. It’s haunting me and I can’t figure out why.
Pau and I drive North on the 110. We’re headed to her studio in Lincoln Heights for our interview on her upcoming exhibition, When The Home Becomes Body. I moved to Los Angeles two-and-a-half years ago and freeways are still just a jumble of numbers. I’m a mess without Google Maps, but Pau’s from here, so she’s directing. She’s the kind of person who tells you a turn is coming up before it happens. I’m too into the conversation and almost miss the turn anyway.
In the studio, Pau pulls out a stack of prints. The photos are disorienting. A cacophony of limbs, toys, masks, patterns, and prosthetics layered into ambiguity. Dimly-lit and hypersaturated, the images are imbued with the unique strain of mourning that arises in anticipation of loss, rather than in its wake. The neon-red glow of Pau’s acrylics draw my gaze, sharpening the other edges into focus. I begin to recognize objects from her apartment: a mannequin hand, cartoon figurines, retro-floral throw pillows, the greeting card of a naked old man swinging a golf club, Pau’s Garfield dress, the turntable spice rack, that one thrashed pink wig, and there, again, her Scream mask. Photos of Pau as a kid, and from early in her transition, peer out from the tableau. She describes the work as archival but, to me, it seems more anti-archival. The objects are personal, on display yet occluded. We’re denied access to their context, their resonances, i.e. you wouldn’t know this just by looking.
For the series, Pau has been photographing the common areas of her apartment during the day. When night falls, she projects the photos onto her body, in the same site. Not always on the same day, though, or from the same angle. Some were taken from above but projected across, because she couldn’t angle the projector downward and be in the shot at the same time, she tells me. It’s a hot mess of spacio-temporal uncertainty. The dissonance is jarring. It’s more intentional than I’m making it sound.
In one of the images, Pau’s squeezed in the bottom left corner of the frame, wearing an orange bralette; her shirt unbuttoned. It feels more casual than sexy. The sticker-dots from the kitchen wall behind her are projected across her body. She stares directly into the lens, defiant, or maybe just over it. The piping on her shirt outlines her body in this almost cartoonish way. The window behind her is blocked out by what appears to be layers of transparencies, giving it this stained-glass vibe. I try to make out the details, then remember there’s no window in her kitchen. “None of this is here,” she tells me. “None of this exists except my body and the shelves.” I touch the photo. Pau softly pushes my hand away and gives me this look, like, seriously? “Fingerprints,” she says.
The sticker-dots were the first decoration she put up when she moved into the apartment. Her first time living alone. By the time this exhibition opens, she will have already moved. The dots have already been taken off the walls, she tells me in the interview. I realize later that I forgot to ask her whether she kept the dots, and if so, what she plans to do with them.
Pau’s recent performances manifest in the form of confessional vignettes, an overflowing collage of pop and personal ephemera, juicy tell-all dates and disappointments. Mannequins and wig heads serve as stand-ins for her friends and lovers, her problematic exes. She guides you through a landscape of emotional excess, serving up gossip and violence in the same breath, and with the same flat affect. It’s playful, painfully funny, and almost teenage. More auto-voyeuristic than exhibitionist, she performs with an awkward vulnerability that feels like an invitation. This is calculated. Her cadence is metered. In her hands, autobiography is always only sort-of and confession functions as “a means of problematising the promise of an authentic self—a fantasy of authenticity,” as Trisha Low writes in The Compleat Purge, a kind of “self-on-self drag.”
Just when about to lose yourself in the fantasy, she laconically flicks a tank top across the chest of a seated mannequin and designates it/them as “B”—her long-term situationship/partner/it’s complicated, and the absurdity of it slaps you back into the awareness that she’s been shifting the frame this whole time. “We’re always made aware of the hand,” she says. She doesn’t let you forget it.
Pau’s Lana-Del-Red acrylics get top billing in When The Home Becomes Body. They’re featured in almost every photo in the series, the one steady point of reference. I mention this. “The realist part of my actual body, she says, “is the nails. They’re so close to becoming cartoon, but they’re real.”
Sliding prints to the side, she pulls one from the bottom of the stack. It’s all stomach and tits. Her body’s tipped backward in bed. She’s staring you down through the sunken eyeholes of a plastic green Hulk mask. “I’m not a realist by any means,” she tells me. It’s a really ugly image. Overblown and comically abstracted. I’m transfixed. Shot from below, she appears to be in mid-fall, her hands raised as if defending or shielding herself, though the pose is anything but submissive. More a sense of being caught than exposed. Honestly, from this angle, it/she/The Hulk just looks kind of worried.
“If you saw this work right now, and I wasn’t wearing a mask,” she says, “I would hate it. That wouldn’t be my work. I’m not an artist like Paul Sepuya, you know, or anyone who makes work where we see the whole body. I love that work. It’s grounding of the body in reality. It’s not me.”
In true 90s paparazzi It-Girl fashion, she’s all about that flash, it’s voyeuristic pull. Transposing the effect from glamour of the street to the dark interiority of her bed, she performs becoming object. She holds the camera invasively close. In the glare of the flash, she is split into isolated parts, teasing at the fetishization of trans bodies in this moment heightened trans visibility and exposure. She caricatures herself against a backdrop of anti-trans legislation and dehumanizing rhetoric that makes the already casual violence against us all the more nonchalant. As Pau puts it, “most days it feels safer to just not leave the house.”
When I get home, I look up the hex code for Hulk green. #008000. She-Hulk is the same. According to Wikipedia, unlike Hulk, his superhero cousin, the brilliant lawyer Jennifer Walters, retains her normal personality in She-Hulk form—actually preferring it—and can switch back and forth at will. In a moment of utter mystification, The Hulk illustrator Mike Vosburg reflects that, “The oddest thing…was that Frank [Miller] drew really beautiful women, I drew really beautiful women, and yet, She-Hulk was never overly attractive.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time and energy thinking about my own physical body and making my body as beautified as possible, Pau tells me. “I like creating these images that are much more gnarly. I would say, any image of my body in this work, I wouldn’t think of as sexy or aesthetically pleasing. It’s in radical opposition to the way I usually move through the world.” The mirror in the selfie, I find out later, is Pau’s first full-length mirror since transitioning.
In Females: A Concern, Andrea Long Chu claims that “gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for.”
In all eight Scream movies, the killers wear the mask, everyone else is screaming.
And the call is coming from inside the house.
“There are no walls and no doors,” writes Greta Gerwig, director of the Barbie movie, in an email to Architectural Digest. “Dreamhouses assume that you never have anything you wish was private—there is no place to hide.” The Dreamhouse (and its no-makeup-makeup predecessor, the dollhouse) is a site of girlish fantasy. Within the fluorescent pink-architecture, little girls (and secretly, or through coercion, their brothers) rehearse and rough-cut the bangs of compulsive femininity. The Dolls join in.
Pau finds a three-story dollhouse on the street and drags it back to her apartment somehow. She texts me a photo of it. It’s no Dreamhouse. More of a cottagecore affair. Still pink though, and empty enough for her purposes.
In Social Realism, Trisha Low writes, “Give a girl a room of her own and she can produce a whole world, we’ve been told by many. She can write her own zine, find her own band, create her own blog, all that bullshit. But sometimes a room isn’t safe at all. Sometimes imagination can be its own prison…Rooms have a way of betraying you, especially when what you’ve built in them is so entirely yours. Your solitude can consume you.”
In one of Francesca Woodman’s many untitled photographs, she is framed from the waist down, naked except for black ballet flats. Francesca sits on a wooden chair beside the imprint of her body, a dark silhouette in a thick dusting of flour, meticulously strewn across the floor of a derelict apartment. The apartment has that formerly-luxurious, deteriorating, Tarkovsky-like quality to it, in which the space itself becomes subject. It feels abandoned, which seems somehow unlikely. I try to confirm this online and am foiled by a blockade of paywalls. I wonder if Francesca rented the apartment, or if her parents paid for it.
Francesca’s naked again. This time from the neck down. Her back is up against the far wall of the apartment in the flat composition of Space2. Two wide strips of peeling floral wallpaper are wrapped around her body, obscuring her face and genitals. This is no Real-TreeTM floral fantasy, and she’s definitely not passing. People call her work haunting. This could be the long-exposure blurring the outlines of her body, it could be her early suicide. We are made and unmade by our environments. It’s mutual.
As we’re about to leave the studio, I ask Pau about the role of play in her work. “Part of it’s a queer strategy of moving through the world,” she says. “Part of it is living in an imagined state, so that I never have to fully live in reality. There’s a politic to that, and there’s an absurdity to that, you know? If play, if costumes of layering is about escaping the world, my work never escapes. There’s almost a fantasy. Sometimes it gets very close and sometimes it never gets there at all. We rarely allow it to get to the full fantasy of Barbie World.” She tells me that for her next body of work, she’s committed to finally go back to the world. “Most of my work has always been about the public intervention, but I left that when I transitioned.”
In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes of hope as a critical methodology, as “a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” By this exhibition opens, Pau will have moved. Her apartment is leaving her, that is, she is leaving her. She spreads her dollhouse, open-face, on display for your voyeuristic pleasure.
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Emji Saint Spero is a transqueer writer, performer, and pervert living in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective engagement through movement, documentation, personal ephemera, and collaborative performance. Saint Spero is co-founder of the Oakland-based small press / queer poetry cult, Timeless, Infinite Light, co-developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, and the author of disgust and almost any shit will do.
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