The Tender Abject: Bethany MacKenzie’s (DE)COMPOSING
Bethany MacKenzie | Rogue Gallery |Feb. 6 – Mar. 21, 2026
Reviewed by Amanda Marie Hull
Bethany MacKenzie’s (DE)COMPOSING unfolds as a meditation on what it means to come apart—and, simultaneously, to be made. Turning insistently around its parenthetical title, the exhibition reframes decomposition not as simple decline but as a generative condition: a loosening that is also a forming. Across five works, MacKenzie situates queer-femme embodiment within this cycle of unmaking and reassembly, where softness and exposure operate as ways of knowing rather than vulnerability alone.
The exhibition’s gravitational centre is a ghillie suit installation that stands upright as if inhabited by an invisible body. Its internal supports are concealed, producing a perceptual doubling—presence braided with absence—that sets the conceptual tone for the show. The suit rejects the muted logic of camouflage, blooming instead into sensory profusion. Layered fibres and plush materials unfurl in pinks and reds, burnt siennas, powder blues, whites, and flashes of sunny yellow. Long strands of wool, cotton, mesh, and velvet-like strips cascade downward, punctuated by patterned white lace and occasional iridescent synthetic feathers or leaves. Threads drift onto the pink platform below, as though the suit were gently shedding parts of itself.
(DE)COMPOSING, exhibition photo by Laura Sbrizzi
The effect is tender, haunting, and quietly magnetic. At first glance, the form flirts with the monstrous; yet it feels delicate and meticulously assembled, oddly unguarded rather than defensive. What emerges is an unsettling of bodily boundaries, akin to what Julia Kristeva describes as the abject, where identity is disturbed at its edges. Here, however, the suit does not repel; it beckons, inviting an aesthetic of permeability, touch, and unexpected intimacy. Feminine excess—lace, softness, ornament—is reframed as a mode of refusal, enacting visibility, relationality, and insistence, rather than something to be disciplined.
(DE)COMPOSING, exhibition photo by Laura Sbrizzi
Three large photographic works (photo-documented by Johnny C. Y. Lam) extend this refusal into motion. Each captures the same suited figure dancing in a grassy coastal landscape at night. The face remains obscured; only hands and feet anchor the human presence as the rest dissolves into fibre and movement. The photographic technique renders motion in streaks that flare like fire, producing a rhythmic visual release across the images. The body does not attempt to disappear into the environment; it insists on being present within it, in vivid relation to the natural elements.
The exhibition’s most conceptually provocative gesture arrives in the final installation: a large pile of oversized fabric “worms,” rendered in pastel tones and accompanied by a sign inviting viewers to remove their shoes and play. Beneath their pillowy, hosiery-like surfaces, internal wire gives the forms structure. The invitation reads as disarming, even whimsical. Yet within the logic of (DE)COMPOSING, the worms carry unmistakable philosophical weight. As agents of breakdown and return, they embody decomposition as labour. Scaled up, softened, and made companionable, they invert the human viewer’s relation to the ground, asking the body to navigate the space of the worm rather than stand above it.
It is in this inversion that the exhibition’s title fully opens. To decompose, MacKenzie suggests, is already to begin composing otherwise—matter redistributed, identities unsettled, bodies held in states of ongoing revision. As a first solo exhibition, (DE)COMPOSING reveals an artist deeply attuned to the material and philosophical stakes of making. The work lingers because it resists closure, insisting instead on cycles of dispersal and return, where becoming is always already underway.
Amanda Marie Hull lives in Conception Bay South with her husband, Paul, and fur-child, Sookie. A doctoral student at Memorial University, she’s an imaginative eco-socialist who loves books, wine, Sunday brunch with friends, and metaphorical rabbit-holes. She believes the world remains a good place, and storytelling may save it yet.