Opening Reception:
Friday, Sep 5, 5–8 PM
Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–4 PM
Join us at The Compound on Friday, September 5th, for the opening reception of our second group exhibition “The Misfire: Engorgement and Constipation.” Weird, vulgar and chaotic, this exhibition stages a tense duet between two bodily extremes: the outward pressure of engorgement and the inward collapse of constipation. These conditions, absurd yet deeply familiar, expose the stalled rhythms and misalignments of modern desire. Here, the body is not a seamless system but a trembling mechanism caught between overstimulation and dysfunction.
The words “engorgement” and “constipation” are juxtaposed here with a touch of cynical, unyielding humor, as the author is well aware. However, these two sensory organs are intimately intertwined, while also signifying two distinct neural pain sensations. Engorgement is the pent-up, unresolved pain that has not yet erupted outward; it is pain that progresses toward outward expression due to excess. Constipation, on the other hand, is the inward-directed pain caused by accumulated tension that has not been released; it is systemic failure and marginal pain triggered by blockage and stagnation. One expands outward toward pain; the other collapses inward into dysfunction.
“Misfire” becomes a structural metaphor—not a failure, but a refusal to start cleanly, to pulse on command. In this space, control slips, delay speaks, and malfunction become meaningful. Drawing from queer phenomenology and critiques of productivity, the exhibition features six multidisciplinary artists – Christian Amaya Garcia, Colin Klavins, Christine McDonald, Angelica Neyra, VILLAGER and Echo Youyi Yan, inviting viewers to experience how these words—never meant to share a stage—interlock, clash, and conspire to create a state of dysfunctional cooperation. The misfire is not a prologue but a recall—a moment when the body, pulled into the center of human experience, no longer a hidden backdrop but an active, trembling system that makes its own sound. Delay is not an interruption but a rhythmic modality. Loss of control is not a pathology but an alternative ethic. The body has never been a ready system, but a political unit in the process of disintegrating, trembling, and reorganizing itself through acts of distress.