Disaster Femmes - Hilary Greenstein paints feminine bodies that refuse to be contained or controlled. She takes inspiration from art history, found images, and magical realism and reinterprets the female body through electric color, textured surfaces, collage, and bold use of gaze. Drawing on her own experiences as a queer femme, she explores the body, femininity, selfhood, and autonomy. 

This body of work presents vibrant heroines to harness the power and agency of queer femmes. These characters are time-travelers, sourced from Big and Fat nudie mags from the 80s, old National Geographics, and other found images. Magazine sources that are minefields of objectification are transformed through my process of collage and painting into active subjects with defiant gazes. She mines our collective histories for heroines, confidantes, and surrogate selves. She shapeshifts her subjects into abstract environments, creating dream-like worlds. They coevolve with and merge into their limitless spaces, unable to be contained within the image frame.

Disaster femmes is her own queer, chaotic-good play on the femme fatale. While the trope of the femme fatale presents femininity as duplicitous, her protagonists exhibit both mysterious power and vulnerability. Self-possessed and looming large, disaster femmes are protectors, active witnesses, and arbiters of judgement among the disasters surrounding us. 

She has explored painting on velvet since 2018. Velvet allows her to investigate material tensions of hardness vs softness, opacity and transparency. The history of velvet painting is one of religious iconography, pop art, and folk art- as such it is often associated with kitsch aesthetics. Its reputation for tackiness, of a so-called “low art” form utilizing a rich material, is fertile ground for recontextualizing intimate moments into potent tableaus. The negative spaces of velvet function both as tactile flat surface and receding color fields implying deep, internal space. Through reimagining her subjects as hyper-saturated velvet apparitions, I’m challenging passive, exploitative, and one-sided ways of collective witnessing.