"Stays Cold Longer" Art Exhibition

"Stays Cold Longer" is open to the public. The exhibition is closed on weekends, university holidays and during private meetings. 

Presented in collaboration with the School of Art, the exhibition is curated by school director and associate professor Hilary Harp. Explore unsettled animacies across video, photography, painting and sculpture in works by Krista Leigh Davis, Villamil & Villamil, Grace Piontek, Lily Regalia and Dawn Kushner.

The ghostly turn of the Waymo steering wheel, the weird agency of miracle weight loss drugs, the alluring sycophancy of our AI agents — the blurring of the boundaries between life and non-life is accelerating. It seems an opportune moment to return to Mel Chen’s seminal 2019 book “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect” to consider the ways that queered animacies are appearing in the work of contemporary artists. As Chen says, the notion of animacy “activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural body/cyborg.” This idea is illuminated by the artworks within this exhibition.

“Stays Cold Longer” is drawn from the AI-assisted karaoke lyrics created by Felipe and Sebastian Villamil for their piece “Truly Madly Deeply.” The lyrics are compiled from phrases gathered in meandering walks through downtown Phoenix, where often the only signs of human life were littered big-gulp cups still tainted with chemically dubious liquids.  How does a liquid “stay cold longer?” The phrase points to the agency of chemicals and to our bodily imbrication with inorganic compounds. Each featured artist destabilizes hierarchies of animacy, situating the human in surprising interminglings with domestic interiors, landscapes, AI agents, microscopic worlds and objects formerly known as inanimate. 

About the artists

Krista Leigh Davis is a visual artist working in video, animation, performance and sculpture, living between Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in territory (Dawson City, Yukon) and K'jipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her practice is a space where dirt, bones and jars of microscopic algal communities meet costumes, wigs and jars of glass glitter; where queerness and an unruly curiosity for the natural world guide research and artistic exploration. Within this space, Davis uncovers creative, even fantastical strategies for shifting human and more-than-human relationships towards a more ecologically just world.

Villamil & Villamil is a Colombian artist duo founded by brothers Sebastián and Felipe Villamil. Working across sculpture, animation, moving image, sound and immersive installation, their practice appropriates elements of contemporary visual culture and intervenes through strategies of spectacle, including amplification, staging, repetition and hypervisibility. Through these interventions, they seek to disturb the “consensus of reality” and draw attention to the invisible infrastructures that shape it.

Grace Piontek (they/them) is a visual artist exploring the ecology of queer animacy, intimacy and its expression. As a photographer, they primarily work with film. Using analog practices offers a tactile and embodied approach to image making, one that mirrors the human experience of physicality and possibility to err. As a photographer with a visual impairment, the language afforded through these discoveries is a vital part of their practice. Grace is exploring other media as well, including textiles, ceramics, and video art. With a previous background in ecology and biology, their work arises out of the mythologies and hypotheses of the scientific world, exploring sites of tension or incoherence. 

Lily Regalia (she/her) is a painter born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and based in Phoenix, Arizona. She explores how domestic spaces are structured to mirror the psyche. Working across painting and drawing intertwined with direct observation and self-portraiture, her practice investigates themes of identity, intimacy and absence. Having grown up in a family that renovates houses, there is a continued fascination with observing their interiors and how people within inhabit the in-between. She uses these unfinished states to reflect the instability and incompleteness within human connection.

Dawn Kushner (she/her) is an Appalachian interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers around grief, memory and the cumulative effects of extractive capitalism. Raised in West Virginia, she examines how personal histories of loss reflect and intersect with broader histories of labor and resource exploitation. She uses photography, archival materials, found objects and digital processes to materialize absence and persistence.

This exhibition coincides with the institute’s Queer X Humanities initiative that fosters queer and transgender scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and critical dialogue about LGBTQIA2S+ culture, history and politics. 

For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events, visit our events page.