Victoria Dugger, Bed Bugs Bite, 2024, Gouache, fabric, and pearls on wood panel, 60 x 72 x 2 in. (Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York)
Fluffy white clouds slowly roll by as a yellow balloon floats up to the heavens, cutting off two giant (by comparison) butterflies that zip around the golden-hour skies. Below, a flower-filled field, barricaded by a wholesome white picket fence, sits abandoned, seemingly post-picnic with a gingham blanket and a garden hose trickling into the whirlpool waters of a blow-up kiddie pool. The only evidence (and I mean evidence) of its former population is a lone ruby red slipper on the blanket and nearby, a hatchet, dripping with similarly ruby red blood. What happened to Dorothy?! The answer may be found just beyond the fence where a candy-colored pink and blue house bursts with flames and roiling black smoke, which mars the otherwise clear skies. Did someone pull a Lizzy Borden and then burn the house down? The mind reels at the gruesome possibilities. Yet, the simple pleasure of ghoulishly cooking up gory scenarios isn’t what drew me to Victoria Dugger’s painting, wryly titled Friendly Fire. Though I am partial to death and disaster exposing the unsightly underbelly of an idyllic American landscape, as seen in my previous admiration for Abigail Goldman’s similarly brutal miniature crime scenes, I am even more taken with Dugger’s joyfully tacky materials that decorate the edges of this circular panel. A three-dimensional white picket fence, amusingly advertised as a “miniature fairy garden fence” online, is pinned with bows and little fabric butterflies (similar to the two plopped on the painting). Just inside the fairy fence, though, is the real kicker: a thin braid of sunset-colored Barbie hair, pinned with precious itty applique roses.
As soon as I laid eyes on this small rope of doll hair, I could feel my kitsch-adoring synapses firing. So much so that I had to stop myself from falling to my knees in Dugger’s current show Tough Love at Sargent’s Daughters to scream in the quiet gallery: FUCKING FINALLY!! A fall gallery exhibition that not only isn’t dreadfully, punishingly boring (a huge feat apparently, given the sheer amount of shows I’ve wandered in and out of blank-eyed the last two months) but also has a thrilling sense of both humor and horror that shines through the artist’s playful choice of materials as much as her merrily, unsettling subject matter.
Victoria Dugger, Friendly Fire, 2024, gouache, fencing, and molding paste on panel, 26 x 26 x 4 in. (Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York)
Friendly Fire isn’t the only breath of fresh air, even if it is choked with billowing smoke. The entire exhibition looks as if Dugger went on a rampaging shopping spree at Party City and Joann Fabrics, resulting in a delightful free-for-all of manic maximalism. Paintings come affixed with big blue braids of wig hair, gemstone-tipped plastic princess tiaras, frilly lace, ruffles of fluffy gingham fabric, looping, winding strings of faux pearls, bursts of multicolored sequins, swishy skirts of iridescent tinsel like parade floats, and swarms of itsy toy ladybugs, which look exactly like the magnet my late childhood kitty Porkchop knocked so far under a chest of drawers that my mother only discovered it decades later. Because the act of gluing these dollar store finds to canvases would be all too subtle on its own, Dugger dusts the show with heaps upon heaps of glitter. Most often the artist cakes this glitter in abundance on jet Black bodies or, at times, body parts, as seen in the disembodied legs kicking in Afternoon Delight. Like a shimmering night sky, the glitter portrays, as Frantz Fanon poetically articulates, “all the cosmic effluvia” of Black skin, recalling Devan Shimoyama’s earlier shimmering mythological paintings.
Almost impossibly, Dugger’s paintings and drawings come off as downright restrained in contrast to her sculptures. The most over-the-top may be Bending Over Backwards, a garden archway turned body horror with four-pointed ballet-slippered legs unnaturally twisted and crammed in nylons as its base. Rather than woven with wisteria, this leggy garden arch is covered in glittery, oh-so-Goth! black roses. Beaded and clipped braids interspersed with blonde hair drip from its peak while pink tinsel hangs from licking blue hair flames held together by a row of tiaras like a born-to-be-cheap debutante ball. Sitting on a patch of scruffy astroturf, Bending Over Backwards stands as a monument to camp artificiality. Hell, even the peaches embedded between the knobby, maybe-knees of the legs are fuzzily fake. I only wish Sargent’s Daughters had placed this archway in the gallery’s entrance, forcing viewers to walk through the tense, tippy-toed feet, the body without a head, and feel the whisp of stiff bleached platinum hair on their skin to enter Dugger’s whacked-out Southern wonderland.
Victoria Dugger, Bending Over Backwards, 2024, Metal arch, nylon stockings, roses, and tiaras, 60 x 37 x 20 in. (Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York)
And I mean, Southern. From the always-ripe faux Georgia peaches to the sheer ubiquity of gingham prints, Tough Love is staunchly and stubbornly Southern. Dugger, who was born in Columbus, Georgia and currently lives and works in Athens, doesn’t pluck out some recognizable symbols from below the Mason-Dixon line and call it a day. Her work draws heavily on the aesthetic legacy of the Southern Gothic, the warm colorful glow that masks a seething undercurrent of historical terror. In her phenomenal Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, Leila Taylor makes the distinction between Trad Goth and Southern Gothic:
“The traditional gothic atmosphere is foggy darkness and English damp, but the Southern Gothic climate is a sweltering humidity and oppressive blinding sun. Instead of tiptoeing through the dark passageways of a decrepit castle on a remote mountain, the Southern Gothic sits in a rocking chair on a wrap-around porch with a paper fan in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other. Instead of ghosts, vampires, or resurrected corpses, the phantoms that haunt gothic narratives are the ramifications of racism, repressed guilt, social pariahs, and marginalized freaks.”
Like Taylor’s insight, disconcerting scenes run through the sun-soaked, technicolor radiance of Tough Love, some more obvious than others like the flaming house and post-hacking ax underneath blue skies in Friendly Fire or the zombie hand busting out of Little Vicky’s grave at sunset in the twin tondo Sweet Dreams. Cheery moments are continually undercut by gross-outs in Dugger’s paintings and drawings. Entrails tumble from a sawed birthday cake in Pity Party. A wholesome summer swing under an oak tree, covered in other ruby red ballet slippers (a Wizard of Oz-ish footwear theme running through the exhibition), turns into trauma with those aforementioned torso-less glittery legs, one foot uncovered to reveal a podiatrist’s worst nightmare with nasty, broken toenails. Even a fancy dinner-for-one explodes into a trypophobia fever dream as a shattered porcelain plate reveals a hunk of raw meat poked through with pearls like fancy maggots. Yuck.
Installation view of Victoria Dugger’s Tough Love at Sargent’s Daughters (Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York)
Beyond this juxtaposition of upbeat color and material choices and memorably disturbed scenarios, a few of Dugger’s soft sculptures seem as if they could literally sip iced tea on Taylor’s Southern Gothic porch. Take the dual smiling and frowning, comedy and tragedy, Sugar Coat It and Soften the Blow, which both plop in painted garden bistro chairs so sadistically hard that I can viscerally imagine their elaborate floral swirls imprinted into my butt. With a headdress-like mane of floofy red and blue tuille respectively, Sugar Coat It and Soften the Blow remind me at once of ornate Mardi Gras Indian costumes (again, very Southern) and the strange indigenous figures that lurk around Fever Ray’s “If I Had a Heart” music video. Part pluffy pin cushion, part floppy rag doll, these sculptures consist mostly of a leering smile and woeful frown, revealing only a few chipped, nicotine-stained teeth in their mealy gummy mouths. These mouths sit atop small nylon stuffed legs, reminiscent of Greer Lankton’s pantyhose-formed distorted sculptural dolls. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that perhaps my favorite detail in the show is found on these two works: wedged in a larger applique rose, a freaky-as-fuck doll eye. *Shudder* Just the materials alone can satisfy lovers of tat and ragged uncanny dolls like me, but to leave it at that is to purposefully avoid tangling with the phantoms that haunt Dugger’s Gothic South. For instance, it’s difficult to look at these sculptures’ gigantic exaggerated red mouths without thinking of not only a carnival funhouse but also blackface imagery—that Southern Gothic specter of “racism, repressed guilt, social pariahs, and marginalized freaks.”
Victoria Dugger, Pity Party, 2024, Gouache, fabric, and glitter vinyl on wood panel, 60 x 72 x 2 in. (Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York)
This mouth appears frequently like a Cheshire Cat through Tough Love, often alongside scraggly witchy claws with long, sharp red fingernails, emerging underneath the table in the disarmingly childlike 32nd birthday party spread of Pity Party or hovering in the handheld mirror in At First Sight. Other times, the mouth is attached to cartoonishly monstrous figures, pairing the gaping mouth with hooded or bulging eyes, as seen in the duo in the monumental painting Bed Bugs Bite. In this painting, one figure crouches on the other’s chest like the sleep paralysis demon in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, while the other clutches a bedspread in terror wearing a bonnet like the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood. It’s hard to say definitively what the hell is happening here, but given their resemblance, it seems as if these twinned monsters are confronting themselves.
By drawing on the Gothic, Dugger is in conversation with other contemporary Black artists who employ the aesthetic, albeit in different ways, to conjure legacies of subjugation and/or discover imagined possibility within horror. I’m thinking specifically of M. Lamar’s operatic Negrogothic spirituals of mourning and Afrofuturist vengeance and Christopher Udemezue’s “island Gothic” photographic reclamations (I want to give credit where credit is due and mention Udemezue recommended Taylor’s Darkly to me). There is a sense of the monstrous in both of their works too, whether M. Lamar’s evocation of Dracula or Udemezue’s embodiment of imposing yet protective queer Afro-Caribbean spiritual beings.
Victoria Dugger, Out of Water, 2024, Gouache and glitter on watercolor paper, 14 x 11 in. (Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York)
Dugger’s monsters creep where you least expect them as well, particularly in her smaller drawings, which just may be my favorites in the show despite their relative simplicity. One gnarled hand reaches ominously out of a bathtub, pushing aside a rubber duckie, in Out of Water while its fingies squiggle, baked in a revolting cake in Pound Cake, which also looks as if it’s lined with a large intestine. You can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape these figures—and sometimes you’d like to, such as in On Your Toes which has to be the work with the most potential for viewer-squirming discomfort. A caricature-like figure in a pink bikini top and a Juicy-branded diaper walks in front of a circus tent using hand crutches. Here, Dugger, who is disabled, also makes obvious that people with disabilities are also included within Taylor’s “social pariahs” haunting the Southern Gothic—not as if that’s a reach given the prominence of disability in Southern Gothic tales by Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.
Dugger’s show is full of dry humor (just take a read of the titles), but I also see these clawed monsters as having a serious glamorous and ferocious power. It might be all the glitter, sequins, and tiaras. And, I mean, look at those nails! In this, I also see Dugger’s work in relation to Taylor’s writing on subversively embracing the socially imposed role of utmost other, the monster:
“Being the monster allows for a unique ability to see in the dark. The other has the clarity and awareness that fear obscures. To be the thing that strikes fear in the hearts of men is to know more than they do, to know them more than they know themselves. It’s dangerous, and to be sure, the villagers will always be at the ready with their torches, but the monster lives where you are afraid to go, it watches you while you sleep, hides in the shadows where you can’t see, it poisons the master’s tea when they’re not looking. The monster knows what you did last summer. America has gotten away with murder for four hundred years, and it’s been sleeping with one eye open ever since.”