between the skin and flesh, a thing[1]
Mae Howard
GALLERY III
Material. I, 2025, Transparent horse leather hide, film photograph, pressure clamp, airline cable, cord grip connector, magnets, crimping loop sleeve, 48 inches x 32 11/16 inches, Made in Collaboration with M. Celeste and Jess Dayan; Photographed by blue.
September 5–October 4, 2026
Opening reception: Wednesday, September 9 from 6–8 PM
In Mae Howard’s inaugural solo show, the objects on display invite visitors to consider: How can ritualized pain and pleasure, reckoning with hauntological skin and flesh stories, offer a means of interdependent relation?
Working with a collective of leather practitioners for over five years, Howard exhibits a series of hides printed with photographs documenting BDSM scenes in which they are both subject and co-author, keeping at the center the collaborative processes that produced the stills. These relational authorships reshape notions of kin and interdependence. Wielding sutures and scalpels—instruments repurposed from medical contexts—collaborators M. Celeste, Fluent, and Jess Dayan move in and out of the images as gloved hands, strict boots, and as architects of the predicaments that contain Howard’s form. Tops take turns behind the camera; photographers and present witnesses Gabriella N. Báez and blue are active contributors to the ritual interventions that challenge and reshape Howard’s flesh and spirit. Refuting the idea of individual authorship, Howard offers their body and the stewardship of it as an intermutual project, seemingly saying: this body is all of ours, we share in its responsibility.
Though inescapably corporeal, the images in the exhibition call to mind a construction project that contends lovingly with the surrounding terrain: something of the earth, emerging as part and parcel of the elements. A chain drapes over knees mottled by river gravel; snow covers the ground beneath a sheathed form. Rather than becoming a gory encasement, a plastic tarp is torn open with precision, as if something precious is packaged inside. The scenes are a burial and erection all at once, building a body that eschews monumentality in favor of slipperiness and shadow. If the distant horizon offers a perceptual limit, the blurred closeness of the body provides a limitlessness.
More alive than mere surface, the leather hides bear evidence of reanimation, taking on pigment and fluid through the photographic printing process, which leaves a veined texture across the grain of leather as if the image were subcutaneously injected. The medical tools used in the documented scenes haunt the final images even as they evade being pictured in them, confronting us with the cuts and impressions they’ve left. In the exhibition space, a leather scent formulated by agustine zegers thickens the room with a heady miasma, an air that threatens to infect viewers by transgressing their bounded bodies as they breathe.
In medical contexts, one is often asked to describe their experience along a pain scale, measuring discomfort on a scale of one to ten. Howard’s disabled erotics refuses the reduction of pain to a unit of measurement, maintaining the immeasurable body [2] as a site of ecstatic belonging both despite and because of pain experience. Here is a care that subverts our ideas of softness and healing, and a process of transformation that exceeds quantifiable midpoints or palatable milestones. Instead, Howard and their collaborators offer catharsis that is at once bloody, trembling, and durational, bound in a tended relational system.
-Tamara Santibañez
Acknowledgements: To M. Celeste and Jess Dayan for bringing me/Us to the edge, the sharp plunge, under and through–you both have utterly transformed me. To Fluent, blue, Cielo, Nat, Alcide, thái, Avita, Sloane, M.K., Johanna, Jean, Carta, Tamara, Tomi, Golden, Ren, Sahar, Kamra, Ray, Jack, Artemis, Stabbie, Bea, Zoey, Duke, Iris, Dandy, Slate, and all my disabled&debilitated leather kin unnamed, may your perversion hold you through the flare. To Gabriella N. Báez, blue, and Jess Dayan for the images, bringing this momentum to the surface. To agustine zegers for brilliantly crafting scent into the space. To Nic McEwen for years of fabrication, installation, and technical support. To Cassils, Sharon Hayes, Julie Tolentino, Michelle Velasquez-Potts, Michelle Handleman, and Sheree Rose for your wisdom, mentorship, and guidance. To Tiona Nekkia McClodden for rigorous conversations around leather as flesh, skin, materiality, spiritual entity, and transitional places. To my grease sisters: Slant, Willa, and Ale for your kinship and to ACRE Residency for making the act of making feel possible again. To Petunia, thank you for your witness and company. To Bob Flanagan, Sheila Courser, Red Jordan Arobateau, Rebecca Horn, and Ana Mendieta, may your ghosts be welcomed in this fleshly space of yearning. Free Palestine. Free Lebanon. Free Them All.
1. The exhibition title takes its name from Amber Husain's Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh (MACK Books, 2023).
2. Language adapted from heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s poetry collection Wayward Creatures (Host Publications, 2025).
Mae Howard is an artist, facilitator, and organizer whose work calls upon lineages of disabled labor economies. Their practice emphasizes endurance as a transmutation and manifestation of long-form debilitation. Howard's work is research-based, participatory, and collaborative, rooted in a shared form of witnessing through collective exchange and relational dependency. Their practice probes the aesthetic, material, and felt conditions of BDSM practices and leather histories as a foil to the medical-carceral industrial complex. They have been a BDSM lifestylist for the last decade.
Howard has received residencies and fellowships from Bemis Center, Pioneer Works, Queer Art, A.I.R. Gallery, ACRE, BricLab, Pocoapoco, and Picture Berlin. Their work has been screened and exhibited at School of Visual Arts, GHOSTMACHINE, Westbeth Gallery, WORTHLESSSTUDIOS, Dia Chelsea, Vox Populi, Atelier Gallery, Automat Gallery, gr__und, and tête among others. Howard has given lectures and participated on panels at Dia Art Foundation, the Migros Museum, Max Planck Institute, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Pratt University, Smith College, and Brown University. They have taught multiple years of coursework at the University of Pennsylvania, The School of Making Thinking and co-facilitated a workshop for Toolbox Collective.
View Mae Howard’s artist page here.
View the Press Release here.