Bad Girls

Sebastian Acero, Fern Cerezo, Jan Anthonio Diaz, Chuy Medina, Reynaldo Rivera, Cruz Valdez, Jessica Mitrani’s Zapato

OCD Chinatown is pleased to present Bad Girls, a group photography exhibition titled after Camila Sosa Villada’s novel of the same name. This show, like the book, explores sex, work, surveillance, and motherhood through the work of emerging artists Sebastian Acero, Fern Cerezo, Jan Anthonio Diaz, Chuy Medina, and Cruz Valdez, alongside Jessica Mitrani’s Zapato Imposible from her series In a Single Shoe, and an archival print by Reynaldo Rivera, curated by Devan Diaz.

"Underneath the decay, the house was still pink. A hopeful pink, an obvious pink, our pink, an impossible pink, unreal pink."

—Camila Sosa Villada, Bad Girls

The man at the deli asks me if I work around here. Well, no, but yes (I work on a computer). Again, he asks, this time making circles around vowels with a pointed finger, Do you work around here? Oh, there: two streets over and up near the food truck plastered with its Times review, the truck favored by cops. He’s referring to the winding cul-de-sacs and dead ends of Roosevelt Avenue. Those early streets of St. Cecilia Gentili, streets of my Aunt Kika, streets I never asked either of them about, streets I’ve lived near for fourteen years. Where the girls make money and hold onto it by using it to fill their bodies. Bodies I can’t look away from. Bodies not unlike mine; it was tax dollars that filled my chest.

In Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls, Auntie Encarna is trying to raise a baby she found in the park where her girls work. The girls are always working. She nurses her new child the way they all nurse their johns, from breasts that offer warmth in place of milk. Encarna’s immaculate conception: believing herself a woman and a mother. One morning, I saw my own Aunt Kika walking around alone as I commuted to an office. She was buying cigarettes at the end of her shift, maybe, I could be wrong. When my grandmother, the woman who was—in name only—Kika’s mother, caught me sneaking out in a pair of heels, she called me a whore. She told me it was inevitable that I would become a prostitute like Kika. Page 45, Bad Girls:

"I was determined not to become a prostitute and thought I’d manage it, that I wouldn’t end up like everyone else. But I also wondered who I thought I was to avoid a fate to which so many others had succumbed."

Reynaldo puts his camera on my lap while he speeds down Sunset, both hands on the wheel. Over dinner he tells me he can’t marry his man because he’s been married before, to a woman, and he can’t find her to get a divorce. And because another file on his record has him down as a tranny hooker. I was giving androgyny, he says over and over, and we laugh. We laugh so much together with Palma, a real life-saving laughter. Rey’s never shown this image of Olga, he said. They always say it’s exploitative. I recognize Olga from Reynaldo’s first book, and there’s a lot Rey could have said, but he couldn’t stop repeating the same line: She never got to see this picture. Now I can’t get it out of my head that she never saw this picture, this picture of her absence. Even Olga’s mother stands watching, unwavering, waiting for her to return, like Auntie Encarna’s hope, like every mother’s hope for her child. But at least we get to see the picture.

Look around: you're standing inside of a mall. Perhaps you're eyeing a dress or shoes you saw in a shop window. Sosa Villada writes, The only thing that matters is the shop window. While you're shopping, Fern is standing in front of a camera, showing themselves bare. In Audition and Premiere, Cerezo captures themselves as ingénue and star—roles they have not been assigned or currently occupy. All dolls know that if you can become someone in a picture, eventually she’ll step out of the image and into the world. This is what the camera doesn’t know. A doll’s gaze helicopters over everything; the camera just sees what's in front of it. The camera takes, constricts; its lens, an object of fetish. The anesthetic flash of the shutter freezes time and brings the doll a second from death so she can stake claim. Whatever is achieved in a photograph is hers. Here’s the proof.

—Devan Diaz

Sebastian Acero (b. 1996, Cali, Colombia) is an artist living in New York City whose practice is focused on photography and mixed media.

Fern Cerezo (b. 1994, America) is an interdisciplinary self-portrait artist based in New York City whose work explores the recontextualization of the body in relation to personal and cultural exile.

Jan Anthonio Diaz (b. 1998, Washington Heights, New York) is a model-turned-photographer whose portfolio includes campaigns for Calvin Klein, Zara, and Versace. Now, he is gaining recognition for his work behind the camera, having been featured in Cultured magazine’s 2024 Young Photographers List. His ongoing series, Uptown Girl, celebrates the women and girls that shape his life and community.

Jessica Mitrani is a Colombian-born, New York-based artist. Her multivalent works are fundamentally concerned with exploring social, linguistic, and aesthetic constructs of the feminine. She is interested in the function and circulation of gendered cultural symbols, and how they both articulate and conceal political significance.Through a practice which traverses a range of media, including performance, theater, objects, and film, Mitrani’s aesthetics realize art as fetish and also interrogate the fetish in contemporary culture with a humorous sensibility that illuminates the serious and productive aspects of play. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and broadcast internationally.

Chuy Medina (b. 1991, Mexico) is a Brooklyn-based photographer. Medina’s current body of work documents the artist’s friends in moments of ease and performance.

Reynaldo Rivera lives and works in Los Angeles. His solo exhibitions include Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2023, 2021), and he has participated in group shows at MoCA Los Angeles, Emory University (2023), and Princeton University (2022). His first solo museum show, Fistful of Love/También la belleza, was held at MoMA PS1 in 2024. Rivera’s first monograph, Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020. His photographs are in the collections of MoCA, The Getty, The Hammer, and MoMA​.

Cruz Valdez (b. 1992, Orange County, California) is a photographer who has shot for magazines such as American Vogue, Dazed, and Interview, as well as fashion houses Bottega Veneta, Marc Jacobs, and Dion Lee. Her subjects have ranged from models, athletes, musicians, politicians, and members of her community in New York.