INTRODUCTION
When I first saw images of Victoria Dugger’s work, by way of the Sargent’s Daughters gallery newsletter, I wanted to reach out and touch the work. And this was through a screen. This is a deliberate critique of art historical conventions. “Why can’t we touch it?” my then-five-year-old asked when we were at the Whitney. “Because it’s art,” we told him. As Michael Fried’s landmark 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality proved, discourses and practices in eighteenth-century French painting evolved the quintessential modern paradigm of art viewership, by which the viewer’s consciousness of herself diminishes to nought for an absorptive, disembodied experience, effectively “detheatricalizing art,” as one contemporary review of the book put it. Myriad twentieth- and twenty-first-century art movements have tried to retheatricalize art, wittingly and not of Fried’s book. (Many see a 1960s review by Fried of Minimalism as the precursor to his book.) This is one way to approach Dugger’s work, especially as her work often engages with the body, sometimes from an autobiographical perspective. Much of the collective effort to retheatricalize art is invested in demonstrating that absorptive viewing privileges a transcendental subject. And much of the central aspects of Dugger’s personhood at play here—being woman, Black, and biodivergent—have long been the limit cases for the transcendental subject since at least John Locke. Dugger’s work is indeed an invitation to engage one’s body, all around.
Victoria Dugger (b. 1991, Columbus, Georgia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Athens, Georgia. Her recent exhibitions include New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch at the Atlanta Contemporary; F*CK ART: The Body and Its Absence at the Museum of Sex in New York City; and Soft Anatomy at JEFF in Marfa, Texas. Her first solo show in New York, Out of Body, took place at Sargent’s Daughters and was reviewed by ARTnews and Hyperallergic. Dugger received her MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. She won the 2023 Southern Prize for Visual Arts and the 2024 Hudgens Prize, one of the largest art prizes in the nation, which is reserved for Georgia artists. The solo show accompanying the prize will be mounted at the Hudgens Center for Art and Learning in Duluth, Georgia, from 16 August to 26 October 2025.
Victoria and I conducted this interview over email from 16–27 January. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Gerald Maa
Gerald Maa (GM): Thank you, Victoria, for letting us share your work with our readers. These images are from your recent solo show, Tough Love, which was mounted at Sargent’s Daughters this past fall. What I love about the title is how, to me, the colloquial phrase highlights the materiality of all this work, the sculptural work in particular. And in contrast! I just want to touch all the plush and hairy stuff, even when I’m looking at it on a screen. How do you decide what material and texture to use for what piece? Do you consistently start with material or image first? What does it look like when you start building momentum on a work?
Victoria Dugger (VD): It’s really a “conversation” between me, the work, and the materials. I often have an idea for a piece before I make it, but I don’t know what the finished piece will look like in the end, whether there will be less hair, more pearls, or less spikes and more glitter. There’s always this need for me to make something desirable and grotesque at the same time. I think that’s why I use a lot of visceral materials that provoke that kind of reaction. I try to balance it in my pieces, and it becomes more complex that way. At some point the work is communicating what needs to happen, and it’s less about my decisions and more about what materials are best for the piece to move it forward. It looks pretty tame when I start. Since I often work in paired paintings/sculptures, I already know what I want to do, but in the middle of creating is when I make bigger decisions about what needs to happen next. It’s often an emotional rollercoaster. I often dislike the piece and feel it has gotten away from me, but it always comes back to the desire to see the finished product. Continuity in my work is really important. I often reference my previous pieces or continue with a fabric from another piece to help expand a motif in my work that then takes on a life of its own.
GM: So, the conversation between material and image is bodied forth in conversations between specific paintings and sculptures. What’s one of those pairings, in these images? How did the making of one push the making of the other, and vice versa?
VD: Works feed off each other in the making process and morph, especially with me using the same material symbols, like in the painting Bed Bugs Bite and the sculpture Soften the Blow. I was working on them both separately, but they were both becoming these humorous and menacing characters. The lace edge of the quilt in the painting became the main lace pleated onto the legs of the sculpture. The smile of the figure crouching on the bed (this painting is based on The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli) is mirrored in the two-faced smile of the sculpture head. If I represent something in a painting, I try to flesh out the rest of the world I’m building by taking those images or motifs and creating them three-dimensionally as well.
GM: Seeing the Fuseli up against Bed Bugs Bite highlights how important the domestic is in your work. The bedroom in the Fuseli is mere setting, and moreover dark as a place of solitude and privacy. I love how your work makes myriad—seemingly infinite—worlds with and within the domestic. I can’t help to think of one of my patron saints, Emily Dickinson.
VD: I love Emily Dickinson! I relate to her so much and her gut punches in her poems and these sort of delicate short pairings. I see my work as verses in a way too. I also love Sylvia Plath; the domestic is so important in these works of female solitude. But I think of the domestic as a “safe” place, because that’s where I was the most “normal” from when I was growing up. Because of my disability I was more of an indoor kid, so I relied on Disney films and other movies and books to expand my inner world and my imagination. I also think of the domestic as this place where women/young girls are meant to aspire to have a lovely, lush home. But in a way, as a disabled person, that path wasn’t necessarily expected of me, which kind of freed me from those golden handcuffs and allowed me to forge my own path. Domestic life is definitely a double-edged sword between a safe haven and a prison.
GM: This all makes me think of one of my favorites by Emily, “They shut me up in Prose,” particularly as it starts:
They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
Still! Could themself have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
It’s clearly working out a feminist poetics within this enclosure that the masculine “They” (explicitly stated later in the poem) made to localize female safety, normalcy, and aspiration, which is the domestic, as you say. She ends by pointing out that “Himself” can leave this captivity at will, and laugh it off, which is to say she doesn’t have that privilege. She has to sit there with her Brain-go-round, but you get this treasure trove of poetry, much of it shot through with a distinct kind of wit. Your work also orchestrates a distinct amplitude of humor, from the margins. Why so? How so?
VD: I love that poem! I think I use humor as a way to soften the blow, or to make these heavier topics of disability, race, and femininity more palatable. Not that I’m trying to water down my work, but I think you get more flies with honey. There is humor in life, and that is something I don’t want to exclude. It is ever-present in our daily life, so I think it doesn’t lessen the seriousness of my work, but rather highlights the mundanity of life that we all share. Also, as a disabled person, I tend to cushion my vulnerability with humor. It makes people less uncomfortable; it makes me less uncomfortable; and if you can make someone laugh, humor can open the door to more difficult conversations or lead to a more mutual understanding.
Also, my family and household growing up were and still are full of laughter. My parents and my siblings taught me how to laugh at myself and not take myself or life too seriously, and I think that comes through in my work. Humor is an essential emotion, just as valid as love, pain, joy, anger.
GM: Could we talk about the color here? If someone clicked entirely through the images on your website [y’all should!], they might be surprised to see in the sculptures section a whole body of haunting work in these muted colors from about 2015 to 2017. Whites, blacks, earth tones . . . Could you talk about when and/or how you found the loud, colorful palette you use now?
VD: As far as my color palette, I think that evolved on a few levels. When I first started making my soft machines (that’s what I call them to myself—my anthropomorphic panty hose figures!) in undergrad, I was coming of age and really was moving from my oil painting background. I really have to give credit to my sculpture professor Michael McFalls from Columbus State University, because he pushed me out of my comfort zone in my class and practice at a time when I was already feeling uncomfortable in my body as someone who was going into womanhood. I think, too, he really saw how much I needed to make this particular work and how pure it was to my journey into just loving myself. I’m eternally grateful for him being open to having those difficult conversations with me and supporting me. I started to really think about my body and disability for the first time. Not that I was ever comfortable, but I started to really try to make work about myself. Those first sculptures were really reflections of my self-esteem and this kind of haunted feeling I was having about myself, this kind of invisibility I internalized. I don’t think I wanted to be seen as different, but I also so desperately—I still do—want to be seen and acknowledged. So those pieces were very earthy and muted.
As I went into grad school and wanted to revisit my sculptures and painting practice, I was in a much different place emotionally and mentally; then the pandemic happened. My major professor, Benjamin Britton, encouraged me to explore gouache as a medium for painting and to make these small quick paintings. But gouache doesn’t like to be mixed, so I had these really flat, vibrant colors straight out of the tube that I was working with. So I think my loud/vibrant color palette came out of those raw colors I was using. When I revisited my sculptures, I wanted them to feel free and be beautiful, but also cute and creepy and weird. They became reflections of how I felt about myself and disability. I honestly love using every color available, because it’s a direct reflection of life. We’re not able to curate a certain color palette throughout our day—there’s every color present in our everyday lives, earthy browns caught in our shoes, a bright green of a soda can, the bright red of blood, etc. I love that it’s almost a reflection of the vibrancy and mundanity of life but that it also amplifies this kind of absurdity and nonsense worlds I’m creating.
GM: Soft machines—that’s brilliant! Is there a moniker you use—whether publicly or for yourself—for those leggy chair sculptures you’re doing now?
VD: LOL, I still call them soft machines—I think they’re just growing and evolving with me! But I gave these leggy chairs different titles! Sugar Coat It and Soften the Blow.
GM: Growing and evolving, as they should, these cyborgian miracles. If this practice is the means to come back to your body and to think through and with it, it makes sense that they grow and evolve under a singular name. One thinks of plush dolls when it comes to these sculptures. So the idea of play is evoked. But the artfulness makes me pause to consider larger, preliminary questions about play and gender and use and utility. It’s interesting how the turn to maximal color and materiality pushed your soft machines fully into the realm of the doll.
VD: Yes, I agree with that one hundred percent. And I feel like they fully evolved to that point, but I also think there’s this adornment of the ugly or the time to take care of something that is this lumpy “disfigured” thing. As a disabled person, the acts of care and self-care and play are all intertwined. Sometimes my legs feel foreign to me; I have to pick them up and move them and position them. They feel separate from my personhood. I think that’s why I resonate with my soft machine dolls so much. Play and care are both placed on young girls through these surrogate dolls preparing them for motherhood and nurturing. Also, there’s the aspect of the sex doll that I can’t ignore. This want for objectification. To be seen as a sexual being as well as a human being with desires, needs, and wants. To the “normies,” I think that’s a radical thing for a disabled person to possess—autonomy. I think there’s also a thin line between self-care and maintenance when you’re disabled. Or maybe it’s a great chasm akin to the Grand Canyon, but there is a relationship there. There’s also the infantilization of disabled people.
GM: Could you speak more about this infantilization? Hearing you say this clarifies for me how much the testimony of this work is not so much a depiction of what it’s like being in your particular body. Rather, as I see it, the expressiveness is a demonstration of agency—imaginative, intellectual, and corporeal.
VD: In a way I’m both comfortable and uncomfortable in my body. The sculptures and the work are not just expressions of my own personal feelings, but, I hope, something that resonates with other disabled people. The infantilization of disabled people is something I’m always working against. It’s something that I think I have internalized myself, just like all types of ableism or racism, misogyny, etc. I believe there is an inherent good in people that they want to help their fellow human, but there is a line between being helpful and being patronizing. Most people help, and that’s where empathy is such a powerful tool. I’m just trying to create empathy machines through my art for people to explore this feeling in a safe way, explore differences between each other in a safe way as well.
GM: Which makes me think about the title of the show, Tough Love.
VD: Yeah! Tough love is something that someone gives you whether you want it or not. It’s often seen as something good for you in some way. As someone who belongs to a few marginalized groups, I have a complex relationship with that phrase and idea. I think the relationship I have with society in this country is a type of tough love, the love I receive or the lack/type of love for people like me. It’s hard to love something back when it’s a difficult relationship, and even on a personal level the relationship I have with my body is one of tough love. I’m not going to sugar coat it—being disabled is tough. It’s tough to love yourself, your body, a disabled body, as an entity that doesn’t give back very much to you but that you’re responsible for. There’s also this beautiful physical dichotomy of the phrase; this hard element meeting this soft element reminds me of the relationship I have to my chair, this hard object meeting a soft body.
Images © 2025 Victoria Dugger. Images appear courtesy of the artist.
