January 5 – February 24, 2024
InLiquid Gallery, Philadelphia
Curated for InLiquid
Overview
beLONGING brought together Carmel Dor, THECOLORG, Abbey Muza, and Meg Wolensky, four LGBTQIA+ artists exploring where and how people locate a sense of home.
Across painting, textiles, sculpture, archival research, poetry, and digital culture, the artists considered belonging as something inherited, chosen, remembered, imagined, and continually remade. Dor examined queer identity alongside Jewish diaspora and Israeli nationality. Muza turned to queer histories and archives as places of recognition across time. THECOLORG explored the overlap between physical and digital life, while Wolensky reconstructed places of refuge through memory, dreams, trauma, and hope.
Together, the works asked: Where do we locate home when belonging can exist in a place, a history, a community, a memory, a dream, or a corner of the internet?
Exhibition views
Curatorial Approach
The artists’ work shared a sensibility that was at once soft and abrasive, intimate and resistant. I wanted the exhibition design to reflect those tensions rather than place the work within a neutral institutional frame.
The visual language drew from DIY culture and early-2000s girl-grunge aesthetics. The gallery guide was designed as a folded zine, while didactic labels were mounted on skateboard grip tape and floated behind Mylar. Color, typography, printed materials, and installation details extended the exhibition’s ideas beyond the artworks themselves.
The gallery also included a zine reading nook with materials borrowed from the Soapbox Zine Library and East Falls Zine Reading Room, as well as an open DIY zine-making station. Visitors could sit, browse, read, make, and linger.
My goal was not only to present work about belonging, but to create a sp that facelt speecific, inhabited, and open to differe of pant wayrticipating.
Gallery guide designed to fold into an 8-page zine
Belonging beyond physical place
Across the exhibition, home was never limited to geography. It appeared in inherited histories, chosen communities, memories, imagined futures, and digital networks.
THECOLORG made that expansion especially visible through two monumental B-e-arcode sculptures. Their custom fabric, printed in an electric, highly saturated spectrum, was covered with functional QR codes linking to books, stories, definitions, memories, resources, and other corners of the internet connected to the artist’s sense of self.
In bringing the work together, belonging emerged not as a fixed destination but as something assembled from relationships, histories, memories, imagination, and the places, physical or otherwise, where people recognize themselves.
Clockwise from top left: Candid view of visitors making their own zines, the pop-up zine reading nook, the DIY zine making table, a detail of included zines in the pop-up zine reading nook.
Extending the conversation beyond the gallery
Sip City Mixer
A mixer with Philadelphia queer social organization Sip City transformed the gallery from a place that represented community into one where community could actively form. Visitors gathered among the artworks not for a formal interpretation program, but to meet, talk, flirt, reconnect, and occupy the space together. For one evening, the exhibition’s subject became the gallery’s function.
re)FOCUS 2024
beLONGING was presented as part of (re)FOCUS 2024, the citywide initiative commemorating the 50th anniversary of FOCUS, the landmark 1974 exhibition of American women artists. Its inclusion placed the project within a wider Philadelphia conversation about gender, representation, feminist histories, and who becomes visible within cultural institutions.
Interpretation beyond the gallery
I commissioned art historian and critic Christa R. DiMarco to write Elusive Meaning & Precarious Boundaries in beLONGING, an independent essay examining how the exhibition resisted fixed meanings and binary readings of queer identity. DiMarco paid particular attention to the uncertainty and slippage running across the artists’ work, as well as to the role of the zine library and making station in supporting self-definition and autonomous voice. The essay added an independent critical perspective to the exhibition and
Selected Press
PhillyVoice
“New art installation at North Philly’s InLiquid Gallery explores queer identities”, Chris Compendio
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Metro Philadelphia
“InLiquid Gallery opens ‘beLONGING’ in celebration of past impactful exhibit”, Molly Given
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All images curtesy of InLiquid