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comfort zone

July 4 - July 25, 2025

Group Exhibition featuring Kaila Bhullar, Marissa Sean Cruz, Brigita Gedgaugas, and Joan Valentine. Installation by Rihab Essayh, digital interface by Samantha Herle, sound design by Shae Powell. Exhibited at Whippersnapper Gallery. Curated by Cassia Powell and dani neira (Dirty Dishes Collective).

Comfort Zone’s digital interface was built by Sam Herle. Each artist was given creative control in customizing their individual portals as extensions of the hosted work. Thank you to Rihab Essayh for her hand-dyed textiles used in the installation. Thank you to Shae Powell for the default audio soundscape.

Comfort Zone is made possible by the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Documentation by Lamis Haggag

Curatorial Text

Comfort Zone is a group exhibition exploring queer digital folklore. Taking the form of a 3D game world projected into physical space, the exhibition holds digital works by Kaila Bhullar, Marissa Sean Cruz, Brigita Gedgaudas, and Joan Valentine.

In her cyberfeminist manifesto, Legacy Russell posits we can no longer distinguish between the digital and “real” world.¹ Considering the ways in which contemporary queer identities and cultures have been shaped by online landscapes — including chat rooms, memes, and worldbuilding games — Comfort Zone queries how we relate to ourselves and each other in a hybridized reality. If the digital realm provides a space where users can construct and modify, how do notions of “reality” and “artificiality” play out through the identities, relationships, and worlds we build online and offline? Occupying the slippages between cultural value systems, auto/fictional narratives, performance, and simulation, the works in Comfort Zone explore how our digital and physical realities underwrite and alter one another.

Brigita Gedgaudas’ Be Vardų, Be Kojų: polka.fbx (2025) takes the form of a digital avatar for the artist’s ongoing investigation into queering Lithuanian folk dance. Blending cultural tradition and speculative narrative, Polka, the dance step, is imagined as a queer ancestor and glitching entity. Similarly embracing the technical error of the ‘glitch’ as a site of possibility, Kaila Bhullar’s mirrorloop.exe (2025) creates a “choose your own adventure” environment that explores the construction of queer identity by remixing pop culture, digital manipulations, and analogue footage. Marissa Sean Cruz’ narrative video RAT+CAMMIE=FOREVER (2025) also borrows from pop culture to create a satirical yet touching love story between a personified webcam and rodent girl who meet online. Joan Valentine’s experimental film the body is gone, the signal remains (2024-2025) draws parallels between virtual simulation and self-representation through surveillance footage of the artist’s studio.

While online personas, avatars, and gameworlds are often associated with artifice or fiction, their creation and subsequent performance creates a mixed-reality loop. By performing possibilities through digital means, we enact a “queer orientation to reality”. ² As an interactive installation, Comfort Zone asks its players: What is the embodied experience of engaging with a virtual world? In the merged space of the digital-physical, queer folklore flourishes as we produce and disseminate knowledge that disrupts existing frameworks and imagines alternatives. Comfort Zone invites users to find glitches in the system where “we make new worlds and dare to modify our own.”[3]

Legacy Russell, “Introduction.” Glitch Feminism, 3-14. Verso, 2020.
Jack Halberstam, “Queer Gaming: Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo.” In Queer Game Studies, edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, 2017:187
Glitch Feminism, 15

dirty dishes collective// ddc press

dirty dishes
collective
// ddc press