NEITHER/NOR: TRACI REYNOLDS & LIZ JOHNSON
/NEITHER/NOR:
Traci Reynolds & Liz Johnson
July 3–September 5, 2025
Fenwick Gallery at Fenwick Library
Neither/Nor is a collaborative exhibition between Traci Reynolds and Liz Johnson, both MFA candidates in George Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Working with handmade paper and photography, the artists consider the gendered body as an in-between, non-conforming, unruly space. The gendered body—one that is perceived, shaped, disciplined, and transformed by normative standards and societal expectations—can at turns be seen as dangerous and vulnerable, alluring and repulsive, something to be feared and protected. Like pressing against a fresh bruise, both artists revel in the discomfort and subversive pleasure of this uncertain space.
In a series of photographic self-portraits, Ripe and Rot, Liz Johnson works with decaying fruit as a collaborator. Balanced and braced against her body, the fruit sometimes collapses under its own weight or is crushed by powerful limbs. Johnson uses these organic materials to navigate a complex terrain of fertility, time, and bodily transformation—not seeking an answer, but embracing entropy.
Traci Reynolds’s work, Raise, presents another view of the body (particularly the trans and non-gender-conforming body) as a site for deconstruction and reformation. This large-scale, abstracted, handmade paper sculpture is built through an intense process of beating fiber into pulp, molding and shaping each sheet, and imbuing the still-wet paper with hair and latex—symbolic forms of identity, protection, containment, and kink. Drawing from studies of the abject and the genre of body horror in film and manga, Reynolds’s paper forms are in continuous flux between beauty and the grotesque, tearing and repair, and containment and eruption.
Neither/Nor is on view in Fenwick Gallery through September 5, 2025. Visit masonexhibitions.org to learn more.
