In 2024 Blah Blah Gallery left their space in the “Vox” building at 319 N. 11th St. and moved to a storefront at 907 Christian St. in the heart of the Italian Market area. It was risky to leave an art-centric building for a popular shopping district. Philly’s historic South 9th Street neighborhood is known for its open-air market, trash can fires, and annual greased-pole climbing competition. Today, the Italian Market is a beautiful reflection of Philadelphia’s immigration trends. You will find Mexican and Italian flags sprinkled throughout storefronts selling gelato, second-hand records, gluten-free baked goods, fresh tortillas, and street corn. A few blocks away is Little Saigon, and the best Pho in the city. Further south on 9th you’ll find windows of Luchador masks and Quinceñera dresses. And when you’re done with your barbacoa and chicken parm, you can hunt for remnants of Italian-American maschilismo. At George’s Sandwich Shop, a classic Italian sandwich counter serving up tasty roast pork since 1936, an eye-catching red awning proclaims, “SANDWICHES THAT YOU WILL LIKE! Don’t divorce your wife because she can’t cook. Eat here and keep her for a pet.” And just doors down from George’s, when I stepped into Blah Blah Gallery for Mack Brim’s opening of her solo exhibition, Playing House, I couldn’t help but think of George.
Mack Brim is a figurative painter based in Oklahoma. Her paintings — domestic still lifes and snapshots of women interacting with objects of girlhood and womanhood (bows, pearls, frilly socks, plastic hair clips, a gun), often in sexually provocative ways — illustrate a contemporary feminine experience. The image used to advertise her exhibit is “Killing Time,” a painting of a pink-plastic-play-kitchen sink full of discarded cigarettes — the protagonist of this piece certainly does not cook. In the back room of the gallery are depictions of women in sexually submissive situations and poses, but with overtly feminine twists. In “Stuck,” a close up view shows a woman’s mouth gagged with a giant pearl. Remnants of a full face of makeup are smeared onto a pillow in “Dream Girl.” And in “Choke-quette,” the most explicit painting of the show, a woman in submissive posture is gagged with a big, white, satin bow. Is this what George had in mind, when he said to keep your wife for a pet?
Blah Blah Gallery owner and director, Megan Galardi, installed these more erotic paintings in the gallery’s back room in the hopes that passersby would be more likely to give the exhibit a chance. If George were to enter the gallery, he would see punchy color, close cropping, and consistent, controlled paint. In every painting, he would see a flash and a “from above” perspective, revealing the camera to be an important tool. He would be able to imagine himself above the subject, looking down on it/her. This perspective pushes the subjects further away from personhood into objecthood. Each subject, whether a still life or a portrait, is painted in the same crisp, clean, attractive style: femininity, softness, and wetness abound. George may grow increasingly uncomfortable as he moves through the show, seeing symbols of girlhood up against images of intimacy. Perhaps he hears two women reminiscing while viewing “Stunted” — “I had those shoes. You can hear the clank in them.” If he has a daughter, he, at this moment, might also remember those pink-plastic-dress-up Barbie shoes. But he quickly pushes this memory aside, to make space for whatever fantasies bubble up when he observes sensual lips biting a pearl necklace in “Hard Girl.” Can someone get George a roast pork?
After the opening, Mack talked about how once you make a painting, its interpretation is out of your hands. She is fully aware that her work will be objectified and sexualized in ways that do not align with her intention. But in general, the audience at Blah Blah Gallery – whose mission is “to raise a platform and provide a safe space for women and non-binary artists” – is operating from a similar perspective, a similar lived-experience.
A feeling of collective safety and understanding is palpable at the opening. As I mingled with guests, it was comforting to hear women swap stories about growing up in the 90’s and debauchery in the bedroom. Mack strives to make her work accessible — unladen with conceptualism or academic references. The work is a narrative, open for engagement.
Mack told me her flight from Oklahoma the previous day was 9 hours delayed, and all her press-on nails popped off in baggage claim. I was struck by how much this sounded like one of her paintings. Looking around the gallery, I got the sense Mack photographs and paints images almost as quickly as she imagines them. These paintings are fast, both in process and interpretation. Nothing is ugly, everything is dressed with bows, is pink, is cropped, is curated — like a Barbie Housewife’s Instagram feed. Dreams born via American Girl Dolls, playing house, and trying on Mom’s jewelry, are safe, beautiful, simple dreams, and they are safely painted. As girls grow older, these dreams become tainted. Exposure to the media, interactions with men, and “playing house” in a “single-income household” leave an extreme sense of disillusionment. I see the artist attempting to hold on to girlhood dreams while confronting a complex contemporary feminine identity. Did someone say, Psychosexual Thirteen Going on Thirty?
The movie Thirteen Going on Thirty came out in 2004, the official best year of everyone’s life. When I asked how it feels to be exhibiting this work now, Mack describes how her 2024 work is clinging to a delusion: the idea that everything can be playful and silly and that everything will still be ok. Today, a sense of dread, fear, and harm is creeping into her paintings. In “Manifest(o),” a hand gun is barely concealed under soft, rose-printed sheets and pillows. Masculine energy is invading a feminine space. It’s exciting, though, that this feminine space can and does exist in a neighborhood as diverse and storied as Italian Market, right up against a hilariously sexist restaurant awning and a loudly Pro-Life Catholic church. To view this exhibit within the confines of Blah Blah Gallery’s white walls would be a disservice to the work’s messaging and to Philadelphia’s willingness to engage with contemporary art. The lovely real life quilt of South 9th Street accepts a feminist gallery as readily as it accepts a raunchy sandwich shop. That is a very beautiful, very Philly, very 2025 thing.
‘Playing House, A Solo Exhibition by Mack Brim,’ at Blah Blah Gallery, to March 19, 2024.
Author’s Bio
Joni Sullivan is a painter, educator, and writer living in Princeton, NJ. She received her MFA from Boston University and her BHA (Bachelor of Humanities and Arts) from Carnegie Mellon University. Joni currently teaches painting at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, PA. www.jonisullivan.com
Instagram: @joni__sullivan
