Josie Girand

Psychic Readings* is pleased to announce Josie Girand’s Comic Show a solo show exhibiting a series of her hand drawn scrolls and comics.

Girand’s new body of work is a departure from her vibrant and surreal paintings favoring black pen on paper. The medium affords the artist an immediacy to rendering the truth of what is both witnessed and imagined in our most intimate encounters. Girand’s comics flash like lines lifted from the artist’s diary. The viewer becomes voyeur; in the instance of looking conscripted to step into a best-friend confessional, where one can whisper what really happens, the abject circus we enter in the great act of wanting with a capital W—wanting contact, wanting to watch, wanting to stay for the absurdity—the creature-people we become in pursuit of Lacanian jouissance. Girand’s continues to play with the intersection of fantasy and femininity. In her solo show The Trick at Galerie Shubumi (2024) the artist explored girlhood indoctrination through singular figures placed in romantic landscapes and against unnerving backdrops. These paintings confront the viewer with the girl gazing back and beyond them, pulling the gaze in toward the amorous martyr’s complex dreamscape and masochistic worship. The viewer gains access to the private mythologies, rituals, and idolatries that carry Girand’s subjects over and through their complicated appetites; subjugation sublimated as the subject floats through the peaks and valleys of her own devotion and power.

The drawings surprise by liberating the frozen girl from unsettling and traumatic moments and through the distancing effect humor affords re-animates her subjects now participating in scenes invented by and for her. Girand’s themes of adolescence, power, gender, and dysfunction recall Shary Boyle’s graphic novel Witness My Shame while her playful style and approach evoke Shel Silverstein’s surreal and plaintive scenes in Where The Sidewalk Ends, scenarios that are at once ridiculous and exaggerated, yet affectively poignant and true. Girand follows a similar Silverstein-ian logic that begins with an absurd premise and drives the scenes forward by probing what if this, and then this, and then? Girand reimagines our most debauched and shameful moments and shifts the possible outcomes until the familiar awkwardness of sex, and our participation in it, is discomfiting and unrecognizable. This phenomenon of self-estrangement may best be understood through Julia Kristeva’s theoretical lens:

"The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master."

Girand’s drawings are an invigorating reclamation of girlhood sexuality, capturing a more complex picture that carves psychic space for the little perversions and gross places we contain and inhabit, but are reluctant to admit. Humor is healing; to laugh with Girand’s subjects leaves the viewer more exposed than the subject because to laugh is to be in on the joke, and the joke reveals more about the viewer’s hidden parts than the subjects.

—Julie Schulte

Josie Girand, b. 2000, is an American artist based in New York City. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art and Philosophy from Kenyan College. Her recent exhibitions include The Trick, at Galerie Shibumi, New York (2024), and group show, The Red Show, Galerie Shibumi, New York (2024). Girand has also participated in Art Farm residency in Marquette, Nebraska (2024).