What Juno Birch Thinks of You

The work that makes some people want to analyze every mark and others want to tear it off the wall is usually doing something real. The work that everyone agrees is fine is almost never fine.

Juno Birch is a British artist making illustrations and sculptures that open small windows into strange feminist worlds—breasts, pussies, men with their tongues out, figures who are rulers and objects simultaneously, individuals and clichés occupying the same body. She interprets the universe from a distinctly female vantage point and doesn’t soften any of what she finds there. Truth and its concealment. Power and the body it lives in. Everything is exactly what it looks like and nothing is what it seems.

Looking at her work, I keep being unsure whether I’m the viewer or the subject. Probably both. There’s something deliberately unsettling about that position—her art doesn’t let you settle into comfortable spectatorship. You have to figure out what you’re doing in the frame. I haven’t entirely worked it out, which is why I keep going back.