Between Women: Female Desire in Josie Girand’s “The Trick”

By Liz Scheer

Josie Girand’s debut solo exhibition The Trick–on view at Galerie Shibumi through January 5th–features large, expressive portraits of her close female friends. Though the exhibition contains smaller pieces too, these bigger works (the show features eleven of them) seem to form the cornerstone of Girand’s style and situate her as a painter who explores the imbrication of sexual and social desire in female friendship. Girand’s subjects appear in self-contained worlds that operate with their own axes of time and space; in Miss Blue (2024), for example, a veiled figure reclines on a sandy knoll beneath a yawning, sedimentary sky. Her bridal accoutrements and red shoes suggest her participation in a cryptic ritual that is neither a wedding nor a prom, but rather a hybrid of these rites of passage. Even though the image possesses a wealth of hyper-realistic detail, there is little about it that resembles reality. As in many of Girand’s works, light and shadow do not behave in the way we would expect, and the relationship between the subject, the background, and her viewer is ambiguous.

In her 1985 book “Between Men,” queer theorist Eve Sedgwick uses the word “homosocial” to describe social bonds between persons of the same sex. The neologism “homosocial” is formed by analogy with the term ‘homosexual,’ but it’s also meant to be distinguished from that word. In male relations, these two kinds of intimacies–homosociality and homosexuality–are strictly dichotomous; “homosociality” defines heterosexual male friendship, while “homosexuality” refers to gay desire. While men are stifled by this blunt binary between male friendship and gay love, women can enjoy “an intelligible continuum of aims, emotions [and] valuations” that link lesbianism with other forms of women’s attention to women.

In her analysis of these terms, Sedgwick opts for the term “desire” instead of “love”, marking “desire” as less an emotion than a “social force:” the glue that shapes a relationship. Girand’s work, which could be read as queer, treats desire as this kind of adhesive: a material that binds the painter to her subject in a manner that implies but denies an explicitly sexual relationship. Indeed, Girand’s work slides along the continuum of homosocial and homosexual desire that Sedgwick observes: in Every hair on your head is counted (2024), for example, a woman in a fur coat standing beside a bloody lump and a hole in the ice could be a co-conspirator, while in Girlcock (2023), the figure laid out suggestively with a rabbit in her underpants seems more like a lover. Though affection for her subjects suffuses her work , Girand lets the full contours of her attitude towards her subjects remain somewhat ambiguous–it’s cheeky and lustful, but it’s also tender and loving, even worshipful. Her sitters have “main character energy;” simultaneously mighty and vulnerable, they appear at the center of the frame with no parent and no man to enhance or support them. In Puddle (2024), a young woman in a darkened room gazes upwards as light streams across her torso. The painting, with its slightly campy drama of illumination and shadow, brings to mind Cindy Sherman’s film stills. The Spy (2024) seems to borrow its iconography from a tarot card. Binoculars in tow, the subject figures as a kind of Jungian archetype: a mystic seer whose vision is only accessible to a select sisterhood.

In her artist statement, Girand writes about her work as a reflection on the fabrications spun under the curse of romantic obsession: “People are magical in the way they can transform the most evil, pathetic creature into a kind, gentle lover, by sheer delusion alone.” I gather from the witty, comical drawings that Girand posts on Instagram that the relationships to which she refers are heterosexual ones. My own sense, however, is that Girand’s work actually has very little to do with men. Her aim is to depict the self-reflexive chamber of adoration, envy and eroticism that suffuses the closed world of intense female friendship. This female cosmos is conscious of the male gaze, but it understands that its own powers of titillation arise less from nudity and more from a complex emotional world where platonic closeness and lesbianism dwell in murky propinquity. It is a world that men can never fully penetrate; indeed, the only physical intimacy in Girand’s work is with animals. The subject of Sofia and co. (2024), for example, cradles a rabbit (she turns her head away), while the woman in The Magician (2024) leans on a horse.

At the center of Girand’s work is an old question about the relationship between the painter and her subject: whether representation, as an act of tribute, fetishization, or violence, inherently creates a power dynamic between artist and sitter. For Girand, this creative tension is transposed onto the plane of female friendship, where similar battles of the will are prone to circulate. Any young woman who has been bewitched–emotionally, sexually, aesthetically–by another young woman will intuitively know what these questions are, for their aim is a kind of absorption into the other person’s total gestalt while also apprehending-in them-a patina of danger.

This is the “trick” of romantic female intimacy; on the one hand, it supplies an escape from the world of heterosexual disappointment into a domain of self-contained girlhood: “there are still made up countries where we can hide forever,” the poet John Ashbery writes, “sucking the sherberts, crooning the tunes, naming the names.” The problem is that this “made up country” risks being both ‘the’ trick and ‘a’ trick; is this female Neverland a life hack, or a delusion? What I appreciate about Girand’s work is that she lets that question formally animate her paintings. In particular, I’ve found myself struck by the microbe-like forms that writhe in many of her underpaintings. In The Magician (2024) small, fish-like creatures wriggle under a seemingly matte pink background, while works like Destroyer (2024) and Puddle (2024) feature black silhouettes that press out of the monochromatic darkness. An undertow of anxiety-even mania-is clawing its way to the surface of these vibrant, sensual works, suggesting that beneath the joys of romantic girlhood stir other darker realities competing for space.