Discover the Magic of the Icing Exhibition Curated by Katie Cercone at CIA Gallery
- Isis Swaby
- May 29
- 2 min read
Curated BY Katie Cercone
ICING is an all-femme group exhibition centering networks of sisterhood and queer ecologies of the imagination.
Elevating media historically situated as 'women's work,' nature-based practices and feminine aesthetics to ‘high’ (as in, otherworldly) art, works in the exhibition span a range of mediums from oil painting, to digital photography to new and mixed media. Imagine a technicolor fairy dreamscape draped with faux fur and glitter lace, strewn with mirrors of intimacy, whimsy and gargantuan elegance. Paper mâché blossoms crawl the walls, coexisting with disruptive meaning-making and the politics of burning desire. Blurring the lines between artifice, aesthetic-fashion and absurdity in unapologetic homage to femme camp, as if to prove there’s nothing inherently superficial, nor submissive, about feminine adornment. Delicate or defanged? Buxom or Born Free? Like the icing on a towering cake, these curated objects d’art reclaim feminine aesthetics, from posturing to poise, potentiality to reinvention, caricature to containment and cataclysm. Whether scrying subtly from the fringes or floating by on lavender clouds of fancy, as if dripping down from dangerously sleek stripper heals, like droplets of glistening sweat, five femme artists unleashed take to the white box gallery space, provoking envy and defying categorization. Rooting down in playful acts of fluid, deliberate bodily sovereignty, ICING’s spicy intersectional feminist cohort speaks to and through cultures of care, multi-species ecologies, nature spirits, fairy lore, sex/work, storytelling, glitch feminist techno-futures and AfroFuturist multidimensional frequencies.
Featured Artists:
ICING
May 15- June 3rd, 2026
OPENING NIGHT HAD A 'Live performance' by Metallic Fern
ADDRESS:
1108 Cypress Ave.
Ridgewood, Queens
Gallery Hours Thursday & Sunday 12-6pm or by appointment
