Contributed by Bill Arning / There is something wildly compelling when an installation flips on you—reversing itself in meaning and affect if you linger more than five minutes. “Felix Beaudry: Malleable Young Men” at SITUATIONS is one of those shows. On first entry, oversized, lumpy, monstrous heads loom and encircle you like funhouse demons. They feel nightmarish—deformed, melting, mid-metamorphosis into dangerous humanoid creatures. But stay a beat longer and the menace softens. They become almost cute, like huggable, overgrown Cabbage Patch Kids—less terrifying than misunderstood.
Beaudry’s monster-making skills are first rate. He prompts the question of why visual artists have largely ceded creature creation to Hollywood and gaming culture, with only a few—Hannah Barrett, David Altmejd—daring to pull beings from private unconscious vision into shared space. In our news-cycle image world, where the truly sadistic monsters are omnipresent (suited, media-trained, algorithmically amplified), Beaudry’s mutants begin to feel like allies. They may look grotesque, but they seem to wish us well.
The figures are fabricated using a computer-programmed Jacquard loom, producing custom textiles that define the heads in both flat pattern and dimensional form—eyes and ears woven directly into the surface—before being stuffed and mounted like hunting trophies. One orange-headed figure sprouts a quasi-body on a wooden post, draped in a “skin” complete with nipples and body hair—an unmistakable Silence of the Lambs shiver. Most of the others perch on TV wall mounts or a rolling gaming chair base. The latter feels especially pointed: the dedicated gamer’s throne, designed for total immersion, for the suspension of bodily awareness in favor of digital worlds. Losing one’s corporeal sense to cyber realities hums as a subtext throughout.
It’s in the programmed weaving technique that the darker history emerges. The 1805 Jacquard loom—one of the foundational ancestors of modern computing—used punched cards to automate textile design, encoding each row of pattern onto a card. Those looms are widely understood as precursors to early computers, launching a trajectory that, in less than two centuries, has led us to AI-driven realities where even visual proof feels unstable. The “real world” no longer defaults as the primary setting.
Born in 1997, Beaudry is a cyber native. Still, he wonders how even younger generations construct usable mental maps of themselves moving through social space when AI is the only baseline reality they’ve known. His sculptures insist on their objecthood. In their exaggerated lumpiness they are stubbornly tactile, almost embarrassingly touchable—an analog rebuke to their digital genesis.
The show’s centerpiece, Smokey Dog Council, pushes that insistence further. A sofa composed of six naked figures invites viewers to sit—an ongoing 24-hour cuddle puddle. The title riffs on the ubiquitous Facebook Marketplace reassurance that a used couch comes from a “smoke-free, pet-free home.” These beings imply the opposite. They have bodies. They would have smells. In their imagined odors they assert themselves as not-AI. One can imagine a near future in which we sniff new acquaintances the way dogs exchange information—olfaction as authentication.
Followers of the artist’s Instagram (handle: stinky.felix) will recognize the joke. The digital realm may colonize vision and language, but it still falters at scent. That each figure sports an unmistakably male genital configuration may deter some visitors from leaping into the cuddle, which is perhaps the point: bodily intimacy is never neutral or safe.
If there’s a fault in “Malleable Young Men,” it may be an overabundance of big ideas jostling for attention. Other works nod to Beaudry’s childhood fantasy that his mother—who happened to share a name with the cross-dressing pirate Mary Read—might have led a secret life. Some of the most compelling elements reside in the woven minutiae, threads easy to overlook. Like most poetic meditations on technology’s rewriting of our bodily operating systems, the exhibition offers no remedy beyond awareness. But perhaps the standing invitation to join the cuddle puddle is remedy enough—a small, fleshy sanctuary for our exhausted AI-rewired souls.
“Felix Beaudry: Malleable Young Men”, SITUATIONS, 515 W 20th Street, Floor 3, New York, NY, 10002.
Through Mar 28, 2026.
About the author: Bill Arning is a curator, critic, advisor, writer, and itinerant maker of pop-up shows based in Old Chatham, New York.
