Social Society at Stooj Fine Arts

It was late afternoon, humid and buggy. My father cut holes in the walls of our shop with a chainsaw, each one twice my size. The southernmost corner post was gone, along with another supporting the floor above. There were jagged holes in the roof and stairs.

My parents laughed as they sprayed large black capital letters across the facade, quotations about greed and thieves, ancient condemnations, elegant, correct, Greek. They had signed a contract stating, in the fine print, that anything built on the grounds belonged to The Virginia Renaissance Faire Corporation. There was nothing in the clause about structural integrity. My father had the chainsaw, and no one came to stop us. It had been so hot that people had been fainting all weekend, so Monday was quiet.

If you looked closely, there were other strange things about the fair. There were knights, bustles, and turkey legs, but there were also Civil War soldiers with rifles camped in the bushes. The soldiers taught me what they said was a historically accurate version of volleyball, played with a small leather ball the size of my fist. I was, despite my age,  immediately good at it. They respected my athleticism, and I considered them friends.
I myself only saw the strangeness the day I lost my balance, when I was, just as immediately, off the team. I could see, from where I stood next to the volleyball net, the swamp behind our building through the holes my father had cut away.

My father said the quotes had come from a book, and gestured vaguely toward the cupboards when I asked where it was. I found nothing. When I asked my mother whether she remembered the soldiers, she laughed and told me I was making things up. I tried to find the book online, but all I found were questionable collections of inspirational quotes in philosophical style.

Then I found a book of fragments from Athenian comic competitions, 486-280 BCE: pieces of plays about food, flowers, politics, and domestic scenes. There are insults and crass jokes, drunks and murders, and self insertions. The book also reconstructs the chronology of the authors and traces how these writers knew one another, their jobs, reputations, ages, what they wore, how they looked.

The works in this exhibition similarly consume and repeat, suggest other rooms, dwell in vulgarity, and search for the plot. There is self-portraiture, and still life. These works occupy the room with us. Their artists, too, know one another; they have jobs, reputations, bodies.

Men wrote plays in Athens, in large part, to criticize and influence politics, and to socialize with other men. This exhibition is all women because we know one another, because I like their work.

A fragment from Crates’s Beasts (circa 425 BCE):

When plots were introduced into comedy, there was also a vision of life without work:

Then absolutely no one will get a slave man or woman,
An old man will have to be his own servant. Each of the utensils will come when called.
“Appear beside me, table!“
Come here, fish.”
“Then turn yourself over, and baste yourself.”

-Cammisa Buerhaus, 2026, Berlin DE