Deviant / Domestic: Self Portraits - Closing Reception

Join us for a closing reception from 5:00-7:00pm. Refreshments will be served, and at 6:00pm there will be a brief artist talk.

What does it mean to live through a moment marked by global “polycrisis,” by overlapping and overwhelming forms of disruption, change, and loss? Amid anthropocentric chaos, we are called upon not only to function, but to lead and even to parent; how do we move our individual, fallible bodies through this unraveling world?

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In such an absurdist time, multidisciplinary artists Cara Judea Alhadeff and Emlyn Guiney choose to respond with absurdity, revealing the frayed seams between sacred and profane, catastrophe and (illusory) stability. Their frantically performative self-portraits point to contradictions embedded in the concepts of home and family, both immediate and planetary.

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Using props, costumes, and a playful ethos to engage with the more-than-human world as much as human-made detritus, both artists center the body as a theatrical medium, grounding it into close connection with the earth. Alhadeff is deeply influenced by Butoh, a Japanese dance-theater tradition rooted in psychosomatic reaction to extreme political violence while exploiting the delicious tension between the grotesque and the beautiful. Guiney weaves folk mask traditions with devised dance-theater and clown techniques to play with the idea of wildness (or the lack thereof).

Both artists channel the trickster, exploring the precarity of the “hysterical” woman who teeters at the precipice of excess and containment. Their work refracts the self through a series of dramatic place-prisms both domestic and sublime: the kitchen table and the couch, the orchard and the hurricane-lashed shore. These photographs traverse eros and motherhood, isolation and communion; self-portraiture becomes a practice of vivid attention to what is, and to what could be.

About the Artists

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Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, anarchist mother, performance artist, photographer, writer, climate-justice organizer, and educator, has published dozens of critically-acclaimed books and essays on eco-spirituality, critical philosophy, sexuality, art, petroleum parenting, and living our ecological ethics including Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era and Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. Alhadeff’s forthcoming book, Radical Eco-Art in Action: Unlearning What We Think We Know (Vernon Press), will be performed during the World Affairs Conference. Her photographs and performance videos are in private and public collections including SFMoMA, MoMA Salzburg, the Palmer Museum of Art, and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Alongside Vandana Shiva and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Alhadeff received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Visit Cara Judea Alhadeff's website. 
 

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Emlyn Guiney is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and theater director working in experimental theater and devised performance for the last 20 years. She creates original solo and ensemble performances and performance photography that illuminate the magical, the wild, and the absurd in everyday life. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Emlyn holds a BA in Theatre from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and has performed and trained with experimental theater companies in the US, Canada, and Australia. She currently leads solo and ensemble explorations at Wild Theater, a laboratory for devised performance making. She can often be found making performances in her living room with her 10-year-old daughter, Tula. Visit Emlyn Guiney's Instagram.

Visit the Exhibition

The exhibit will be on display from August 10, 2026 through October 24, 2026, Monday through Saturday, 9:00am-6:00pm. The gallery is located in the Desai | Matta Gallery on the first floor.

About The Arts at CIIS

We in The Arts at CIIS believe that art is essential, that we make change through cultural shifts, and that we cannot build what we haven't yet imagined.

Mission

The Arts at CIIS is a contemporary arts exhibition program that cultivates community engagement and creative and integrative approaches to the urgent challenges facing society today. Through exhibitions, publications, and events featuring emerging and established artists, The Arts at CIIS strives to promote pluralism in the arts, to support artists in the creation of new work, and to foster dynamic and critical dialogues within and across communities.

Desai | Matta Gallery

Our exhibition space at Mission Street was created with the generous support of Helen and Raj Desai and Robert Matta. 

Questions?

Contact Marc Ellen Hamel, Curator, at mhamel@ciis.edu.