Sweet Dreams are Made of This? Gender, Power, and Mythologies in Understory’s Power Exchange Rate

“I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs
I am doll arms, big veins, dog begs
I want to be the girl with the most cake
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.”
– Courtney Love/Hole, 1994

Power Exchange Rate (PER) examines how one’s bodily intimacies and understanding are shaped, regulated, and contested within the structures of capital and power. Through a feminist and queer lens, the exhibition, curated by gallery director Susan Snipes, “traces [the ways in which] personal experiences—relationships, gender, pleasure, and the body—are pulled into broader…[systems of power and knowledge… through their work, the artists illustrate] how systems of control shape, regulate, and commodify personal experience.”[1] Artists include AnneMarie, Emily Fontana, Lauren Poretsky, S. Brown, and Violet Maimbourg.

Collectively, the artists fashion a space that takes us back to the 1990s, when riot grrrls and third wave feminists were donning cute motifs like Hello Kitty, unicorns, every shade of pink with black, while spouting the intersectional gender theories of bell hooks, Judith Butler, Kimberley Crenshaw, and Jack Halberstam, all while marching for reproductive rights, and arguing for sex positivity in the bedroom.

This is a powerful, brave space to enter.

AnneMarie creates a pair of works comprised of Bible pages in various languages, including Latin, which the artist sewed together and highlighted to create new, equally confounding narratives and verses based on their own “cherry-picking” of the text. In these two-dimensional, mixed-media works, titled Cherry Picking, the artist takes the religious text, dismantles it, and reconfigures its contents, weaving another interpretation of The Bible. Through their own “cherry picking,” AnneMarie creates verses: “22 You shall lie with a male as with a woman; 3 This is good and pleasing to God.”

Likewise, AnneMarie contributes If gender is what is in your pants, suck my bedazzled…, an installation of a dozen penises sewn in bright sequined fabric. They poke from the wall, as ultimate signs of masculine power, yet AnneMarie depreciates their cultural value with the kitschy-queer, glam materials. They also make a play on “gender,” which is often conflated with sex (gender is social/relational/performative, sex is biology, while hormones–connected to physiology–inform gendered behaviors), as if the penis is, indeed—can be, embodiment of gender (masculinity).

Violet Maimbourg takes on the female body and what defines gender identity in Who I Want To Be vs. What I Actually Am, the centerpiece of the exhibition. It is carnivalesque, pure spectacle from a distance—the baby blue, the flashing lights, the body parts, yet, upon closer scrutiny, the viewer is pulled into the physical and emotional whirlwind. Viewers connect to these works on their own terms, so interpretation is also personal; for instance, hormone replacement therapy is used for transgender people seeking to better align their sex and gender, as well as for menopausal symptom relief in cis-women. The flashing lights could be a visual equivalent of hot flashes, which may come (and go) at any time, day or night.

However, this is a piece about gender transition. Maimbourg emphasizes breasts, but not as objectified apparatuses for advertisers, nor erogenous zones for her own please, but rather, as specimens—those sculpted in What I Want To Be… have been removed, cut from rib cage/bone and are on view at the center of the life-size sculpture. As the title implies, they are about identity. At eye-level there are syringes and empty bottles of hormone replacement therapy medicines, and below, at about waist-level, two milky-white objects floating in a clear bottle. Despite the spectacle it creates, Maimbourg’s piece is somber, melancholic, clinical. The title evokes the grief involved in emotionally processing “change.”

As Maimbourg said when directly asked: “The estrogen vials are what I have injected into myself every week for the past 7 years or so as part of my gender transition. The decanter represents my testicles that were removed during gender confirmation surgery.”

Sequined heels are featured appropriately close to the ground, evoking Dorothy Gale’s ruby slippers and the mantra, “There’s no place like home,” which of course refers to arriving at the body and identity in which she is finally comfortable.

In the 1990s, trauma experts began to assert that one must return to the “inner child” to heal from psychic and bodily abuses like those thrust on women and queers on a regularly, throughout life, and this impulse is evident in PER, through the works of Emily Fontana, Lauren Poretsky, and S. Brown. Emily Fontana adds sugar-sweetness to the mix with My Dreams Are Ruined, a fake cake topped with a unicorn and “i thought that unicorns were going to be real,” written in faux icing; an ode to the lies (like Santa Claus) and at times disappointing realities of girlhood.

S. Brown’s photographs are studies in what the artist was using to distract themselves as Roe v. Wade was struck down on June 22, 2023. The photographs themselves are a study in the anger and grief of that moment in history for generations of American women, particularly those with a lifetime of reproductivity ahead them. S. Brown’s Cocktail reads like a documentary photograph, a piece of evidence from the artist’s subconscious, their drunken-dream-state.

If only it were a dream.

Lauren Poretsky’s Fair Trade installation is comprised of a large bed pillow sewn from fake 100-dollar bills. Hanging ominously from above the pillow are four large and menacing whips of the same material. Poretsky’s “money” was printed for the movie industry, a detail that adds an ironic twist—the money looks so real, the dreams on which it rests so are seductive.

Indeed, how much are we “whipped into shape” around our understandings of sexuality/intimacy and gender by apparatuses of capitalism and agents of political power? Our very understanding(s) (lived and otherwise) of femininity, the female body, and gender itself, are tenuous and—in 2026, may even be dangerous.

PER is a welcome analysis of the power, agency, and oppression of the body (sex) and gender, and Snipes’ exhibition makes it palatable and fun, subversive sugar-sweetness.

POWER EXCHANGE RATE
Understory Gallery
W. 78th Street Studios
Cleveland, OH
Through February 21, 2026

[1] Susan Snipes, “Power Exchange Rate” (https://www.understory.art/power-exchange-rate, accessed February 16, 2026).