Ailsa Ogden’s figures pull up the dashed pleasures of nights that probably looked better on camera. Drawing here is a smoke machine that emulsifies your vision: skeins of electric colour, smudged contouring, Balenciaga swagger and oversize, Cocteauian line. Ogden’s figures have an indeterminacy about them, even as citations abound in the work to queer worship of the masculine body: the pages of Physique Pictorial, Tom of Finland’s exaggerated proportions, and candid references to places where nudity is encouraged. What does it mean to project recent desires and icons into these queer pantheons, to create messy love triangles with the men of Tom’s Saloon or W. H. Auden’s erotic poems? Ogden’s gender-diverse characters take us beyond a definitive sense of the ‘I’ to embodiments that are more mutable. To get to this place Ogden will redraw a figure over and over, chasing an aslant on recognition that she needs to first get right in order to get wrong. Ogden’s name for this is ‘the agony and the ecstasy.

Dr Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo - Art Historian and curator