Kembra Pfahler at Emalin

What I do in my life is create a climate that allows me to be visited by my artistic muse. Your mood, if you’re open to it, tells you what it wants you to be. Sometimes I just sit in a state of complete stillness and wait for my ideas to come through to me. Or when decorating my apartment – constantly redecorating and repainting is a huge part of my artistic practice. If I am getting ready for a new show, I’ll repaint the walls tile red, scrub all the windows, and move all the objects from one side of the house to another. I’ll spend eight hours a day in here excavating and reacclimating myself to the paper, getting all my materials ready like I am preparing for battle. I gather all my fetishes, all my war instruments together, polishing my guns, as it were.

– Kembra Pfahler, as told to Michael Bullock in Kembra Pfahler (Rizzoli, 2026)

Emalin is pleased to present Hungry for Trash, an exhibition of new works by American artist Kembra Pfahler (b. 1961, Hermosa Beach, US), the artist's fourth at the gallery and her first in The Clerk's House.

A foundational figure of New York's downtown underground, Pfahler has shaped the countercultural aesthetics of the Lower East Side since the 1980s through a practice spanning performance, film, music, drawing and sculpture. In 1990, she and Japanese artist and musician Samoa Moriki founded The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical death-rock band whose legendary performances became the primary arena for the development of a visual and philosophical vocabulary through which art and life become inseparable.

Decoration, for Pfahler, is a radical act: since the early 1980s, she has maintained her East Village apartment painted entirely tile red, the colour of New York's brick buildings – every surface from floor to ceiling, its objects and furnishings included. The gesture gives material form to “availabism”, Pfahler's philosophy of making the best use of whatever is closest at hand, and carries a political dimension she shares with one of her early collaborators Jack Smith (1932–1989), whose utopian project transformed marginal and neglected spaces into sites of fantasy and collective inhabitation, proposing that to remake one's environment on one's own terms is to make a claim on what life could look like. The objects Pfahler brings to The Clerk's House – all painted tile red – are the material embodiment of that proposition. Polaroids and new Femlin drawings extend her practice of radical self-portraiture, appropriating the hypersexualised Playboy cartoon as a vehicle for transgressive self-inscription. Hungry for Trash, a film by Isaiah Davis (b. 1992, Bronx), commissioned by Participant Inc., presents Pfahler in full Karen Black regalia: body paint, bouffant wig, blacked-out teeth, performing the monstrous femininity that has defined her practice across four decades.

Pfahler has developed the following philosophies, operative across her practice, to which she continues to devote herself:

Availabism
Making the best use of whatever is closest at hand, whether household objects or one's own body, as both medium andinspiration. Associated with punk and DIY movements, “availabism” is a celebration of abundance: the willingness to work across disciplines with whatever is present.

Anti-Naturalism
A discipline of the present, finding meaning and justification for beauty in things that are blighted, embracing radical artificiality and transgressive femininity over naturalistic standards. It neither mourns nature nor applauds its destruction, but calls out what is real.

Beautalism
The practice of making beauty out of brutal real-life circumstances, premised on the conviction that vanity is the enemy of interpretation. Beauty, in Pfahler's terms, is a site of transformation and transgression.

Yesterbating
Pfahler's critical term for nostalgia: the unproductive recycling of the past as a substitute for engagement with the present.

Gothletics
The practice of physical training in darkness, coined to describe Pfahler's nocturnal workout regimen in New York. It emphasises the freedom to engage in rigorous physical or artistic endeavours using only what is currently at hand – a corporeal extension of “availabism”, the body itself becoming the available material.