At Tyler Park Presents, trans femme artist Pau Pescadors exhibition Amor Prohibido takes on the volatility of being seen in public spaces where queer existence is criminalized. As anti-transgender legislation grows alongside advancing security technologies, the shows 118 photographs and a video artwork wrestle with how visibility is policed and misread. A 2015 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology even describes how intruders in gender-segregated areas can be detected using facial recognition softwarea specter the artist pointedly resists by turning the cameraa primary instrument of surveillancetoward her own experience.
Grids, props, and the joke of coherence
Across a suite of photographic grids, Pescador builds and dismantles bodies in public using outlandish materials, loosening any grip on a single, legible self. Works from the series How do you solve a problem like9 (all 2026) unfold in sequences of 4 x 6 inch C-printsfor instance, How do you solve a problem like9 (1), 2026, appears as a grid of sixteen 4 x 6 inch C-prints, 19 x 27 . The photographs track the artist as she playfully assembles anthropomorphic figures: pool noodles become arms, an avocado costume stands in for a torso, and a clown mask functions as a face. The humor is pointed; these absurd stand-ins lampoon the mandates of a publicly appropriate body. When the constructed figure in How do you solve a problem like9 (2) slips free and collapses in the final frame, the fantasy of a stable identity gives way, too.
Private frames and a hostile public
Moving from the street to the bedroom, the eponymous photographic series lines up close-cropped Polaroids that record the artists body in bed. In Amor Prohibido (3), Pescador stares into the lens wearing a cartoonish mask with eyes half the size of her face, pushing the portrait beyond what facial recognitionor a paranoid passerbymight neatly parse. A related work, Amor Prohibido (1), 2026, is a Polaroid photograph measuring 15.25 x 12.25 x 1.25 .
The video The body becomes space9, 2026 (single channel, 11:45), blends found footage, clips from the artists life, and text segments into a semi-narrative about being deemed illegible in a hostile public. Pescador recounts constant checks for deceit and legibility : a man at a grocery store calls her a man in heels, and customs agents question border crossing when they cannot locate an alleged biological truth. Between text passages, she plants Polaroids from her private space into the public realmimages that may be unreadable to others yet refuse erasure.
Amor Prohibido closed on July 18th at Tyler Park Presents, 560 N. Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004. In a moment when social and legal systems cast transgender people as deceitful or incoherent, Pescadors exhibition turns that charge back on the systems themselves.
Vía artandcakela.com
