Goddesses once etched into stone tablets and later deified in oil paintings now live another immortal existence: nude or scantily clad, wet and voluptuous, digitally rendered and plastered across Reddit or X, they resemble magical beasts or aliens. Some have had their hip and breast size transformed to impossible proportions while others have otherworldly skin and hair colors. In some cases, these goddesses possess multiple sets of genitals or pairs of dimorphic sexual organs—a gesture that humans have been exploring since an unknown sculptor created the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in Imperial Rome. The glow of the screen is new but the subject matter is not—portraits like these have been with us since the dawn of culture. I bring this up because with the current political hysteria about transgender rights flooding public discourse, it’s helpful to remember that humans have been horny freaks since time immemorial. To me, this suggests that our horniness and desire to emulate and even pleasure ourselves to the bodies we imagine is both healthy and natural.
“RULE 34,” the debut solo exhibition of New York artist and former member of Sateen Ruby Zarsky at Ceradon Gallery, is a meditation on the serene pleasures such images can grant their viewers. The more than 30 works included in the show are replete with images of nude, possibly hermaphroditic women. Obscene by design and inflected with homages to popular anime and video-game characters, “RULE 34” abounds with girthy uncut penises and voluptuous breasts on unblemished, athletic goddesses.
In Cosmic Consciousness (2024), a be-dicked woman resembling Chun-Li Xiang, a character from the 1991 video game Street Fighter II, holds herself up from a seated position, spreading her legs to display a penis that is larger and longer than her foot. While it may be tempting to dismiss the painting as pornographic or fetishistic, such thinking ignores Zarsky’s subtle choices—especially the choice to use Chun-Li, the first playable female character in the Street Fighter series, as a subject—to produce the image.
Ruby Zarsky, “Fierce Diva,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Ceradon Gallery.
Among the other works, Fierce Diva (2024) and Glorious Queen (2024), a pair of paintings that feature scan-like renderings of early transvestigations that feature transsexual women fooling johns and making careers as athletes and celebrities, stand out as illustrative examples of Zarsky’s historical eye. Meanwhile, the impeccably titled To Kill a Chimera You Must Use Lead From Above (2024) seems to be the skeleton key that unlocks the entire exhibition, with the hung, latex-wearing dominatrix at its center fingering another t-girl and placing her hands around the circular, schematized grid that erupts from her ass.
Tucked within these references to recent digital and trans history is an implicit send-up of the places where queer people, and transwomen in particular, sourced their identities while seeking refuge from the imprisoning mythologies of cisgender heterosexuality. Artists like Zarsky, who embrace and honor the obscene, are able to accomplish a form of radical honesty and trust in their desires that many will never experience. In the most liberating sense possible, “RULE 34” lacks cowardice. The show is as political as it is pleasurable.
