Toxic Shock and the Hotdog features new work by Jesse Harrod that engages the intersections of social support, queer community, and D.I.Y. punk. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large-scale sculpture that doubles as a wall that supports a series of posters for a fictitious band called Vagina ToucHers. Layering the faux upon the fictitious, Harrod’s installation highlights the blur between surface and depth, enacting and unworking the relationship between supporting structure and artwork such that the support merges with the surface. This sculpture brings into relief many of the surrounding elements that oscillate throughout Harrod’s work, where materials and craft processes associated with domesticity and reproductive labor infiltrate, and are infiltrated by, the butch-femme aesthetics of queer punk. By bringing the domestic and the street together, Harrod registers the distance between the heteronormative domestic sphere and queer forms of conviviality and community expelled from such spaces. At the same time, she also probes the relation between the hidden and unacknowledged material infrastructures of support that uphold formations of queer community, even as she underscores the vernacular roots of queerness within punk culture.

Jesse Harrod is the Head of Fibers & Material Studies at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Harrod has exhibited her work in solo and group shows at the American University Museum in Washington, DC, the Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, Nurture Art in Brooklyn, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Haystack, and the Icelandic Textile Center. A book about Harrod’s work, featuring Jenni Sorkin, Allyson Mitchell, and JD Samson is forthcoming from Publication Studio.