Priscilla Rose Howe is the kind of whimsically accented storyteller that's as comfortable referencing the pencil-drawings of modernist greats as they are pulling gleeful lewdness from subversive and provocative cult films.
Read MoreClose to the surface of Howe's compositions is the idea of villainy. For whatever reason, it's only in the last few centuries that female sexuality has been taken seriously, where previously the right of pleasure was exclusively active and male. The artist arguably works out of some of this prejudicial residue, dashing the idea of appropriate femme horniness which fluctuating beauty standards police more scrupulously than male counterparts.
In another time women taking charge of their own bodies and what they wanted to do with them would've found their sexcapades coming to grisly ends—either by burning at the stake or drowning or some other horror in an inventory of religious bloodlust. Howe's figures, then, with their big-dick energy and elongated noses, are either those same women in underground refuges, or modern iterations grown into the permissions of the age. Either version is compelling. Period villains basking in their own natural audacity.
Howe's figures might be deliberately exaggerated but you couldn't call them ugly. If anything they are natives of an elsewhere steeped in grubby erotics, arguably from a utopian longing for the kinds of sexual community internet-fueled self-consciousness makes impossible; or at the very least difficult. They're obviously queer, not so much preaching queerness as nonchalantly feasting. Beyond this Howe's carnivals appeal broadly to the animal intelligence of bodies, or more accurately the appetites and practices polite society either persecutes or tolerates with rhetorical reluctance.
If Howe's compositions show bodies with amplified swaggers of sexual confidence, it is only because they're allowing unfiltered impulses to the skin, a blissed-out vengeance of the dirty, the horny, the uncouth and the shrill. This is arguably why food is so frequently in frame, tying sex to the idea of feasting. An unleashed reprieve for the starved. With their leering hunger front and center, Howe's devil-may-care revelers are the perfect antithesis to the air-brushed self-presentations of the dating-app era, and all our cloistering embarrassments about falling short.
Priscilla Rose Howe is a contemporary artist based in Ōtautahi, Christchurch.
Text courtesy Jhana Millers.
