The pervasive act of stooping discarded, wooden furniture and steel armatures feeds directly into Catalina Ouyang’s multidisciplinary practice as a sculptor, poet, and performance artist. Merging these separate pieces into a succinct new installation, Ouyang brings out the transitory states of found objects. Their sourcing while in residence is that of local fabrics at the nearby Goodwill on Biscayne, and how they are casted into resin. Memorializing items, even when they no longer serve the purpose they once did, become fragments of imagined architecture through the artist’s interference. The softness of velvet is hardened into a shell of itself. I learn that this hardening of the gentle is explored not just in the physicality of Ouyang’s installations but also across core themes of power play, cruelty across history, and rage as a weapon.

The largest sculptures tackle the toughest realities as Ouyang traverses medieval and contemporary depravity in the periphery of desire by laying out the realities of sex work and sexual violence for viewers to grapple with and process. The mangled human frame of the artist’s younger self deepens a knife’s blade into a school desk as their hollow eyes look onto drawn selfies that their ex-lover sent after raping them. It feels like Pompeii in its gravity and confession of the destruction that one witnesses in their lifetime. Ouyang activates the visual weight of this emotional processing through live readings and on-site engagement under or around their creations. Standing under a magnified metal version of a brank—a torture instrument invented during the 1500s to muzzle women’s voices and humiliate them publicly—Ouyang recites poetry. The willows perform the pendulous choreography of heartbreak / that spit edification of the body vaporizing into moss. This reclamation of being silenced is a testament of the artist’s potentiality to turn abuse on its head.