Parallel Play

September 12-October 18 2025, Night Owl Gallery, Baltimore, MD

Opening reception: September 12, 2025, 5-9pm
Closing reception: October 10, 2025, 5-9pm
Last day of exhibition: October 18

In conjunction with Vivisepultura by Rory Holcomb

To exist one need only let oneself be, but to live,
one must be someone,
to be someone,

one must have a BONE,

not be afraid to show the bone,
and to lose the meat in the process.

Man has always preferred meat
to the earth of bones.
Because there was only earth and wood of bone, and he had to earn his meat,
there was only iron and fire…

…and where there was no being to win but where there was only life to lose

-Antonin Artaud

I find the fragility of my flesh significantly precious.

– Vivian Sobchack

In Parallel Play and Vivisepultura, two concurrent exhibitions at Night Owl Gallery running from September 12th through October 18th, artists Jonah Brock and Rory Holcomb work in dialogue, each addressing the body as lived experience, contested site, and overflowing boundary ripe with friction. Across painting, textile, and installation, their works imagine a form of sociality that is opposed to dominant American forms of relationality and sovereignty with its insistence on staying with the body’s material presence: its vulnerability, its unruly pleasures, and its refusal to be reduced to mere image.

How aware of our bodies and the bodies of others must/can/are we allowed or forced to be? How many times have you touched someone today? What is the fear of bodily contagion? What is its ecstasy? As Lauren Berlant writes: “We know why threatening things threaten us; it’s harder to know why it’s difficult to live with the things we want. It can’t just be that we fear losing them, we fear having them too.”

As their titles suggest, the shows run parallel and perpendicular to one another. Brock’s Parallel Play references the social conditioning for children, encouraged starting at two years, in which they play next to, but not with one another; “a stage through which children pass as they develop from solitary players to social players.” Meanwhile, Holcomb’s Vivisepultura, a term for live burial, questions a variety of ways one can be both living and dead, separate but part of a mass. The title brings to mind the ecstatic punishment for Vestal virgins found guilty of “incestum,” who were sentenced to die by vivisepulture, forced to be as alone as one can while their sexual partner, if known, was beaten to death. Punished for daring to couple by gruesome loneliness.

Connections and separations abound: In Brock’s Dog Pile (2025), one leg centered in a pile of amputated legs is tattooed at the knee with a bug that could be a cockroach, hinting at what it means to know and not know someone or oneself depending on their physicality, a la Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. This is echoed in Holcomb’s Finally Defeating My Problems (2025), where a huddled figure with carapace wings is kicked and prodded by antennaed boys. And then there’s the satisfying easter-egg of small text in Holcomb’s Group Hug, Eventually I Would Get Tired of Fighting Zombies (2025), where a zombie arm outstretched to hug or attack is marked with the text: “love is a beetle in the brain.”

We see rib bones and spine on Brock’s dog pile / my memory palace is full of slumber parties and slaughterhouses / lie me on the floor of your cage (2025), a meat quilt (meat cute) ready to be wrapped around a single or multiple body. Holcomb’s Skeleton in the Making takes these same parts, spine and ribcage, and stretches them out out out of the body, pulled by a death-moth skeleton. Or, perhaps equally possible, these bones are being zapped into their body, not unlike a Renaissance painting of the annunciation, in which the seed of God is lightning-bolted into Mary by a bird or tiny Jesus, flying on a crucifix. Meat and meeting are inextricable, as evidenced in Brock’s Jo, in the studio (2025) where an intimately rendered friend and lover is surrounded by a floor better read as flesh than wood grain.

Brock and Holcomb dare the viewer to question the limits and boundaries of the body, both physically and mentally, erotically and platonically, as well as displaying a dizzying breadth of how bodies can come together and apart. How do bodies pile up? Group hugs, slumber parties, dog piles, cuddle puddles, games of twister or wrestling with siblings, mass graves, beatings, zombie hoards.

The exhibitions take up what Vivian Sobchack has called the need to “stay with the meat,” resisting the cultural tendency to abstract the body into symbol or spectacle. In her critique of Western philosophy’s “betrayal of the body,” Sobchack reminds us that “there is nothing like a little pain to bring us back to our senses, nothing like a real (not imagined or written) mark or wound…” to remind us that we are our bodies, not just beings who are in front of them, and that without the friction and relationality of others, we are lost. This shared position underpins both artists’ approaches: to remain with the flesh, in its limitations as well as its possibilities is to acknowledge the ethical and affective ground of not only being but being with others and being other. It answers the call of how to survive now. Since, as Sobchack states, “if we are to survive our new century, we must counter the millennial discourses that would decontextualize our flesh into insensate sign or digitize it into bits of information in cyberspace.”

The overused theory-bro refrain of “we don’t know what a body is until we know what it can do,” is challenged and blown out within these exhibitions in a thrilling way. What does it mean to mold a body? To form, shape, control; to knead and need; love and spread and sculpt, slice, dice, gather and multiply through connection?

-Katherine Guinness