Paradise
curated by Graham Feyl and J. Sova
Stove Works | Chattanooga, TN
February 27 - June 6, 2026
“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” - José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009).
This Paradise is not a distant, utopian place or future. It is unbounded in time and space, built and rebuilt endlessly by those cast out: the queer, the other. Paradise asks: What is survival in a world with ever-ending apocalypses such as climate devastation, genocide, the stripping of human rights, xenophobia, and rampant capitalist greed? More specifically, how do those historically pushed to the margins build their own worlds and sense of paradise in order to survive, connect, and seek pleasure?
Rather than frame Paradise strictly in terms of its relationship to enclosed, idealize garden spaces - evoking benign, historical tropes - the exhibition presents itself as an unruly space. Unruly as in: disorderly, wild, uncontrollable, disruptive, and disobedient. Terms that have been used against and to describe those of us who defy and resist normative standards and expectations. It is within this unruliness that this exhibition situates itself; it is here in untamed space that Paradise begins to take shape.
Paradise brings together works by thirteen U.S.-based artists responding to the urgent labor of shaping something from nothing. Moving between installation, painting, video, and sculpture, they trouble and explore ways of world-building, resistance, relationality, and storytelling. They alchemize terror into art, reminding us that paradise is not an idealized elsewhere but a shared practice of survival.
Paradise brings together works by thirteen U.S.-based artists responding to the urgent labor of shaping something from nothing. Moving between installation, painting, video, and sculpture, they trouble and explore ways of world-building, resistance, relationality, and storytelling. They alchemize terror into art, reminding us that paradise is not an idealized elsewhere but a shared practice of survival.