Ghost Motel
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
Jellyfish Kisses
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The momentariness of experience in transient and queer spaces such as motels and bathhouses, particular environments that Jellyfish Kisses simulates in her solo exhibition Ghost Motel, speaks of escape and escapades in one’s own world— a labyrinth that leads to different rooms where everyone appears to blend in with the soft red luminescence engulfing the entire place. The seeming sameness of everybody and each body makes you feel comfortable with your own skin.
The ghosts in Jellyfish Kisses’s exhibit are versions of herself that she is finally freeing in the present, while acknowledging their existence in the past. She combines punk aesthetics and queer sensibilities in her works, including paintings, soft sculptures of sex toys and species, and animation of the otherworldly personifications of her alter ego. Her series of paintings evoke dream-like scenes through the use of soft outlines and overlays that mute her distinct splashy colors and aesthetics. This creates a certain blur both in the foreground and background of the painting to emphasize particular details in her subjects, hinting at the fragmentation or distortion of reality that occurs in a dream. Her paintings reveal how she perceives the world that she imagined in such spaces: like a dream.
The existing spaces she recreated, from a karaoke bar (2019) to a panic room (2020), bring into the open the kind of interactions that usually transpire in private, without necessarily intending to expose them in public through her art, but rather to create immersive experiences that normalize these interactions. The exhibit further asserts her concept of a judgment-free space that fosters genuine connections and “real tender moments that can be shared by communities inside these places.”
Ghost Motel is Jellyfish Kisses’s personal way of opening oneself to the world again after her lockdown-themed series of work, continuously making space for ideas, emotions, and tenderness for herself and other people. In the absence of prying gazes, she finds a sense of liberation in exploring sexuality and sensuality that most of us struggle with discreetly and openly. Jellyfish Kisses invites the viewers to indulge and enter the Ghost Motel with curiosity— the only key you need to unlock its meaning.
– Words by James Luigi Tana
