INCARNA

High Noon is pleased to present INCARNA, a group exhibition featuring works by Judy Giera, KC Crow Maddux, Reuben Paterson, and Benedict Scheuer. Centering on embodiment as an endlessly fluid theme, each artist gives shape to what stirs beneath the surface: pain and joy, social inscription, inherited story, ecstatic state, and mystical ancestral narratives. Their practices open thresholds where sensation, belief, and memory take material shape—whether through painting, textile, or sculpture. Tracing the residue of touch, the weight of transition, and the shimmer of conviction, each work distills an emotional terrain into a radiant, intimate incarnation.

In Judy Giera’s sculptural paintings, ornamentation provokes and glorifies. Resin, rhinestones, hormone therapy needles, fake teeth, and yarn are embedded into high-gloss surfaces that fixate on dislocations and ruptures of the body. In her works, Giera sustains contradictions by folding pain and play into unapologetic displays of self-authorship, value, and kitschy worship. What could be read as sites of vulnerability reconstitute as powerful compositions that gesture towards an enduring and fierce resistance. 

KC Crow Maddux’s The Map and the Territory series examines how the body is made legible—or illegible—through systems of power and representation. Airbrushed dioramas, visible only through incised silhouettes, evoke architectures of control, where contoured framing reveals just as much as it withholds. As a self-described invisibly trans man, Maddux brings sharp attention to sign, absence, and containment, and questions how identity can be constructed and constrained in harmonious tandem. In his works, embodiment is not fixed but negotiated through distortion, contradiction, and the steady inevitability of externally imposed boundaries.

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Reuben Paterson invokes the taniwha (a powerful, often supernatural being in Māori cosmology) of his Te Arawa ancestors using glitter, Cook Island black pearls, Japanese freshwater pearls, acrylic paint, and mixed media in Hotu-Puku, The Devourer of Travelers (Constellation Draco). Flashes of ‘poppers-yellow’ against deep blacks evoke the palette of queer nightlife, while the work iridescently reminisces spiritual and genealogical histories. Paterson conjures a presence that is both cosmological and carnivorous—a devourer, a guardian, and a boundless constellation tethered to lands and legacies.

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Benedict Scheuer’s dyed silk drawings flutter like quick breaths, yet hold the gravity of slow metamorphosis. Rendered on translucent Habotai, each piece unfolds through intuitive mark-making, gardened imagery, and the sedimentation of time. In their Bird Pretending series, animal, body, and environment merge into trembling, transitional forms. Torn and reassembled silks hover between sculpture and ritual, as each composition transmutes through states of fragility and becoming—suggesting that embodiment is not fixed, but cross-pollinates the porous borders between atmospheres and animalspheres alike.

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INCARNA brings together four distinct practices that unravel and rearticulate how sensation, narrative, and belief assume form. Across material and scale, the works elude fixed categorization and become vessels for presence, transformation, and intent. Judy Giera, KC Crow Maddux, Reuben Paterson, and Benedict Scheuer each interpret the ever-evolving complexities of embodiment by offering ideas that can be captured, kept in secret, or entirely set free.