12.26 Los Angeles presents waiting on tenterhooks, a three-person exhibition featuring Antonia Brown, Martina Cox, and Vera Iliatova. Curated by Brittani Lemonds, the exhibition explores the complex interplay of anticipation and transformation, using historical women's dress as both metaphor and material. The title references the hooked nails once used to stretch cloth taut—an apt image for the tension between constraint and longing woven into the experience of girlhood and womanhood.
Through sculpture, drawing, and painting, the artists examine how the female body has historically been shaped, restricted, and idealized. Nineteenth-century garments—corsets, crinolines, and bustles—appear throughout the exhibition, but are removed from their original function and reimagined as sculptural elements or visual motifs. These remnants evoke both the physical endurance demanded of their wearers and the emotional labor of performing femininity.
Antonia Brown and Martina Cox both work with absence. Brown’s steel sculptures recall the rigid forms of historical undergarments, elegant yet unyielding. Her Untitled (Tournure, 1858) embodies beauty and control, pushing viewers to confront the structures behind idealized femininity. In Cox’s intimate mixed-media works, fabric is gathered and stitched like skin, referencing the bodily impact and domestic labor embedded in clothing. Despite the absence of literal figures, the ghostly trace of the body remains central.
In contrast, Vera Iliatova populates her dreamlike paintings with women fully present—active, self-possessed, and immersed in studio environments. Her compositions explore adolescence and transformation with tenderness and complexity. Female figures, rendered in rich tones of gray and blue, engage in quiet rituals of work, play, and reflection, embodying moments of both solitude and solidarity.
Together, the artists offer a nuanced meditation on restriction, resilience, and reimagination. waiting on tenterhooks honors the enduring tension between societal expectations and individual agency while celebrating the radical potential of reclaiming femininity on one’s own terms.
