When a church patron bows down at the altar of religious piety, certain relics are to be expected as a reassurance of the patron’s own moral righteousness–a sacrificial Jesus, a forgiving Mary. But, in today’s secular world, where identity is defined more by consumerist desire, ephemeral objects become relics at the altar of late stage capitalism.

Artist Portia Munson’s world is a cascade of color, a young femme’s fever dream of discarded pastel relics, an altar to the overlooked. Each object she gathers—mass-produced, forgotten, imbued with the quiet weight of cultural expectation—finds new breath in her work. In her hands, the detritus of consumerism transforms into reminders of third and fourth wave feminism–in a post-Roe world, what weight do these signifiers hold?

Various shapes and iterations of plush pink plastic are placed in conversation with each other, adorning a shelf,  filling a table, or in the case of her ongoing Pink Project (ongoing since 1994), an entire bedroom. Pink, that saccharine specter of girlhood, drapes her altars in a blush of manufactured innocence. Hairbrushes, nail polish, plastic ponies—fragments of identity molded and sold in infinite repetition—press against one another, whispering of beauty standards, of girlhood commodified. Munson, who has been collecting pink objects from thrift stores and antique malls for over three decades, arranges these objects as excavations, uncovering the soft power and unspoken rules stitched into the fabric of femininity. The color becomes both cage and celebration, a symbol of constraint and self-expression entwined.

Among Munson’s exploration of color is also blue—deep as the ocean, divine as the Virgin Mary’s robes. Here, the color takes on the weight of water, of purity, of mermaids and their siren call. The objects remain the same: mass-produced, discarded, but through Munson’s gaze, they reveal new narratives, a duality of innocence and seduction. The sacred and the profane collapse into one another, literally bound together by strands of synthetic hair and electric cords, their meanings re-stitched.

Munson’s work is more than the act of collection—it is resurrection. Each tiny pink trinket, each discarded blue vanity, speaks to the silent expectations wrapped around gender, around beauty, around self-worth, and around the identities we allow to dictate our lives. In assembling them, she does not simply critique consumerism’s endless cycle, she creates something that reflects our world back to us, refracted. If a relic offers a moment to remember the spirit that exists outside of ourselves then what difference is it to an object we purchase to demonstrate an aspect of ourselves. Her altars stand as testimony: to what we buy, what we discard, and what, in the end, still owns us.