Don’t just look – touch!
Raianny Queiroz’ Sensory Movements is a reminder of something often forgotten: fabric and art are tactile experiences
Raianny Queiroz | Eastern Edge Rogue Gallery | July 18 – August 30, 2025
Reviewed by Rhea Rollman
The instruction “Look but don’t touch” has been ingrained in us in so many ways since childhood. We’re now trained to spend our days looking—at things to order from the Internet; clothing we won’t wear; novelty items that will spend most of their lives in closets and drawers; dream homes we’ll never live in. We look at the lives of celebrities; we scroll through our phones looking at snippets of friends’ lives, carefully curated to generate envy or admiration or simply to mask the insecurities we all share.
We could spend a lifetime looking. Many of us will.
What we should be reminding each other to do is the opposite. Don’t just look, touch. Stop taking photos of sparkling blue waters, and dive into them instead. Shut your eyes and roll onto that patch of moss; clench the spongy green shoots with all the gentle love you can muster; feel the abrasion of dried spiny leaves on a warm day. Knead the flour with the sort of devotion that might look obscene to a stranger; let the burrito disintegrate in your hands and learn to smile as the dripping sauce and salsa envelops your fingers. Close your eyes while a lover brushes your skin with petals. Breathe deep and name the flowers, let their kisses tell you right or wrong.
We don’t touch enough in today’s world; we look too often before we leap; we look too often, period.
Raianny Quieroz’s exhibit Sensory Movements encourages viewers to cast aside the inhibitions we’ve been trained to self-impose around art, and instead touch and feel with our full range of sensory capacities. Her work juxtaposes watercolour paintings with shimmering fabrics. The effect is stunning. The paintings evoke fantastical landscapes; layers of mountains and crenellated valleys; distant horizons shining with all the hues of an otherworldly sunrise. Is this what it looks like when it drizzles diamonds on Neptune? Or when it rains sideways glass on those distant exoplanets so strange and beautiful we must exorcise them with names like HD 189773b lest they forever haunt our dreams?
Quieroz’ work reminds us fantastic landscapes exist all around us—in this world, today—if we have the courage and ability to step back from our protective distance and immerse ourselves in them. Manipulating the fabrics in front of the paintings(yes, you are encouraged to do so)changes the effect of the visual experience as subtly or dramatically as you desire.
There’s a message here—we affect the landscapes in which we live, also in ways as subtly or dramatically as we choose. There’s no such thing as a neutral, objective experience of the world. Our experience of it is shaped just as much through our own active intervention, as through our passive submission to the manipulations of others. So grab that fabric and see what speaks to you.
Touching the fabrics reveals they’re not the soft, shimmery silks they appear from a distance: each one has a different tactile sensation, from the smooth buzz of mesh to a thicker, rougher sensation evocative of rainbow-hued fish-nets.
The swirl of colour and sparkle enveloping the gallery is a tactile, visual delight to enter; a sanctuary from the white-painted concrete walls that numb our day-to-day lives. At the apex of the gallery is a series of hanging fabrics clustered like so many giant jellyfish hanging from the ceiling. As I wade into them, wrapping myself in the shimmering shower of colour I am reminded of childhood pleasures: hiding in the middle of a wheel full of hanging clothes in the department store, hugging the fabrics close while shutting away the busy, boring world outside. This is the sort of play that ought to have been encouraged rather than scolded; embracing the pleasures of colour and touch and fearless joy.
It’s never too late to start. Sensory Movements is testament to a creative artist thinking in expansive and important ways; a sensuous, tactile gateway to the beauty so many of us have forgotten. It’s a reminder that colour and sparkle and art are tools of resistance as well, if we’re not afraid to reach out and touch them.
Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and audio producer based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023).