Starly Lou Riggs | Winter 2026

Ask a group of Queer artists how they rebel in daily life, and they’ll all chant, “Mutual aid!” 

“I don’t really differentiate community care from self-care,” says LA-based artist Leo Alas. “There are so many things in our world right now that encourage us to be isolated. How is continued isolation gonna help?” This question sits at the center of Gender F*cked!, an upcoming Los Angeles group exhibition co-curated by artists Lo Lundeen and Kate Kiley, opening at Space Matter Gallery DTLA on February 6th, 2026.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with the artists behind Gender F*cked! to learn more about their upcoming show. Again and again, the artists returned to the same idea that community care is how we find one another. Mutual aid is a refusal of the social seclusion that so often shapes Queer life, and art itself serves as reflection of this ethos.

Lundeen and Kiley met through a friend-of-a-friend, a word-of-mouth connection that blossomed into a unique creative endeavor. The exhibition was largely inspired by the ways in which Queer life is so often framed through crisis, tragedy, or headline-worthy harm. Queer history is shaped by ongoing violence and stigma, but it does not define the full scope of our lives. Without ignoring the pain and struggle, Gender F*cked! widens the frame by centering Queer life as quotidien. It brings people together and emphasizes everyday Queer joy as a sustaining and radical force. 

To create can be a solitary act, but to let that creation be seen, my friends, holds the power of revolution. In a world brimming with hellstone, existing as Queer is a rebellion all its own, but unifying is a powerful act of love. Isolation has long been used as a tool to keep people small, fragmented, and quiet. Gathering together pushes back against that. It’s a refusal. 

This exhibition resists the pull of isolation. It opens. It connects. It insists that Queer life, resistance, and rebellions do not need to always feel somber and serious. We can be tender, expansive, strong, and full of light.

Lundeen is featured in the show alongside fellow Queer artists Leo Alas, Manu Garcia, Rhiley Jane, and Shannon Hanson. Working across a range of mediums, each artist approaches resistance through their own lens, from mutual aid and community care to memory, humor, and embodiment. Together, their work frames Queer joy as one of the most durable forms of resistance. 

But what even is Queer joy? We asked Lundeen about the phrase that often feels like a bit of a catch-all. “Full release. [Being] unabashedly yourself,” they said, no hesitation. “Not in any way of sheltering or changing who you need to be in other people’s eyes, but knowing that your ideas—your understanding of your space, yourself—are all accepted.” Gender F*cked! invites audiences to cohabitate this environment alongside the artists. 

For this exhibition, Space Matter Gallery will be transformed into a living-room-like space. The curators hope Gender F*cked! feels like a gathering of chosen family with the gallery serving as the house that welcomes everyone in. “It’s fun to find spaces where you suddenly feel so self-resolved. That’s really what we want to do bringing folks here,” Lundeen says, explaining the concept for the exhibition. 

Several of the artists carry this sense of home directly into their work. Multi-disciplinary artist Shannon Hanson even weaves in little pieces of home into large evocative installation pieces, featuring fabric drapings and even a coffee table inlay. Hanson points to the evidence of Queer joy in the traces people leave behind. “You know, there’s the watermark of a mug on the table from when you had guests over; the keys on the table; or things that are just reminiscent of the people here.” Where we call home can shift and change, but it is familiar. It serves as a space that can contain grief and joy, but most often defined simply by the ordinary. “We’re living full lives, you know. Queerness doesn’t have to be a tragedy or a headline.”

While Gender F*cked! transforms the gallery into a living space, Leo Alas imagines their work living as the bathroom. Their practice draws on bathroom imagery, including an installation they describe as a “bathroom bed,” a domestic mash-up that blurs categories the way many Queer lives do. In a studio apartment, everything bleeds into everything. To be Queer is to stretch the bounds of category, reaching beyond societal rules and expectation in every facet of life. Queerness exists in creatively sculpting the world, not conforming to what is given and taking that for granted. Alas notes, “Creativity is Queer joy”. 

For artists like Rhiley Jane, Queer joy is rooted in reverence for those who came before us. Jane’s work honors Queer elders and commemorates the historical uprising at The Stonewall Inn, holding memory as both instruction and inheritance. Utilizing soft, comforting materials like rug tufts, Jane depicts rough objects—bricks and gas canisters—in bright colors, edged with burn marks and paired with the phrase “Pride Started With a Riot.” Like a wall of family photos, the piece keeps the truth of the past alive while honoring the complexity of celebrating joy born from struggle. Stonewall was marked by violence and state repression, yet it was also an act of Queer coalition that made space for future generations. “A reminder that we have been through this before,” Jane says. “We’ve had attacks from the state before, and we’re gonna have to stick together to get out of it again.”

For Jane, Queer joy looks like unabashed love and refusing to become small in the face of adversity. “Queer people have existed for eons, and will continue to exist for eons,” she says, underscoring both the endurance of the Queer community and the role art plays in holding that endurance together.

For LA-based ceramist Manu Garcia, Queer joy lives in the body, specifically the parts of us that are asked to hold the most pressure. Garcia’s work for Gender F*cked! centers on three organs: lungs, heart, and brain. Rendered in clay, paint, and mixed media, each piece confronts what it means to exist in a world that makes breathing, feeling, and thinking feel like acts of resistance. In Garcia’s tentacled lungs, floral growth pushes through constriction. Anxiety, fear, and the feeling of being trapped coil around the body, yet breath still finds a way out. Flowers bloom from the trachea as a reminder that even under pressure, Queer life persists. “Even though these adversities are taking a hold of us,” Garcia explains, “we’re still gonna be able to breathe and exhale life.”

While things so often feel hopeless, how lucky we are to be of a time where, out of the ashes, rallying exhibitions are born, gathering community, and bringing Queer art to the forefront. Both an active archive and a representative living room, Gender F*cked!* is looking out for you. It is a space where Queer elders live on, rebellion prevails, and we can all collectively fuck the system. 

Swing by Gender F*cked! on February 6th to experience unique original art installations by Queer and Trans Artists in the DTLA studio Space Matter, @spc_mtr.

Refreshments and grazing boards provided by Chef Kerra of The Tide Table, @the_tide_table.

Flash tattoos by PokedFriedRice.

RSVP HERE

February 6th
Opening Reception
5-9pm

February 7th
By Appointment
10-6pm