“A pendant hangs, an amulet works,” claims Fawn, a character in curator Kiel Torres’s script and accompanying text for the exhibition Wishing on My Falsies at Western Front. “Fashion is a sugar pill after all,” responds Demi Whispy, a character named after a style of false eyelash. “It relies on immaterial forces to produce real outcomes.” Fawn concludes: “Myth is elastic. It’s what holds a high ponytail in place.”
Wishing on My Falsies brought together the work of Katayoon Yousefbigloo and the collective A Maior, led by the artist Bruno Zhu. Yousefbigloo and Zhu, both of whom work at the intersection of fashion and art, are an intriguing pair. Each treats retail as a material and setting for their artworks, and each engages with communities that surround retail environments. The art in Wishing on My Falsies flirted with fashion retail as a means of identification, mythmaking, and defining one’s community relations—and leaned into the humor of doing so.
Wishing on My Falsies (installation view at Western Front), 2025. Photo by Dennis Ha.
A Maior is a clothing and home-goods store in Viseu, Portugal, owned by Zhu’s parents. Since 2016, A Maior has doubled as an art and curatorial collective consisting of Zhu, his family, and store staff that hosts a series of exhibitions within the shopping environment. A Maior asks those who exhibit there to respond to the store’s unique conditions but to try not to “activate” or “intervene” in a way that is critical of the retail environment. The store’s existing community of customers and employees are its primary audience, and they already make it “a place that’s activated every day from nine to seven,” as Zhu notes in a conversation with the radio space Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee. For Western Front, A Maior contributed Fall/Winter (2023–24), two large billboards that filled the north and south gallery walls. In them, close-up glamour shots of the collective’s matriarch (Zhu’s grandmother Yu Yan) are bisected by banal images of the inside of her fridge. Yu Yan’s high-contrast make-up—glittery gold eyeshadow, black graphic eyeliner, and glistening red lip—was done by Bruno’s sister, Jessica Zhu.
In each shot, the elderly Yu Yan gazes coquettishly downward, her face partially concealed, while one hand reaches into the foreground as if to grasp the photograph’s bottom edge. One image reveals the whole of a fingernail: unadorned yet lengthy and distinctly almond-shaped, it is the well-maintained nail of someone who has long forfeited the comfort and utility of shorter nails for the sake of beauty. In the photograph beneath, the contents of Yu Yan’s fridge are relatively sparse, consisting primarily of plastic-wrapped fruits and vegetables. In these images, the emotional intimacy of Yu Yan’s expression of yearning—her real-life desire to be seen as beautiful reflected in her manicured fingernail—contrasts with the less emotionally charged (but equally revealing) intimacy of her food-storage habits. A Maior’s billboards seem to ask: Which intimacies do we build into our public persona, and which do we conceal? How does the commercial language of fashion and cosmetics advertising play into the myths everyday people build of themselves?
Katayoon Yousefbigloo, Kiosk (detail), 2025. Photo by Dennis Ha.
Yousefbigloo, an Iranian-born, Vancouver-based artist who has long been a fixture in local DIY music and art scenes, also works collectively. She is a founding member of Liquidation World, a collective-run artist consignment store with the motto “We take everything and everything must go!” In addition, Yousefbigloo is the creative director of P.L.U.R.O.M.A. (Peace Love Unity Respect Oxygen Music and Autonomy), a performance project that stages a semi-regular fashion show and has an eponymous fashion line. Yousefbigloo uses the title “creative director” with some irony. Her approach to P.L.U.R.O.M.A. and Liquidation World echoes the attitudes of Canadian art collectives N.E. Thing Co. and General Idea, who campily appropriated commercial modes of distribution, blurring lines between art, commerce, and the everyday. Indeed, P.L.U.R.O.M.A.’s trajectory is reminiscent of the parodic Miss General Idea Pageant, which first took place in the lobby of an underground theater festival and quickly grew to become the better-known 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, hosted at the Art Gallery of Ontario with red carpet, search lights, limousines, and musical performances. P.L.U.R.O.M.A.’s first two runway shows likewise took place at small DIY venues before moving to a larger institution. The Polygon Gallery hosted the third and most recent edition, P.L.U.R.O.M.A. Resort, which featured a moving circular runway, musical performances, live-streamed visuals, a promo video filmed on a yacht, and choreographed “security.” Yousefbigloo even nods to her artistic lineage in the work she exhibited at Western Front, appropriating General Idea’s “Hand of the Spirit” icon as a repeated glyph in her merchandise designs.
Kiosk (2025), Yousefbigloo’s work for Wishing on My Falsies, appeared at first glance to be the sort of retail counter you’d encounter in a mall’s central corridor, with phone cases or jewelry chains for sale. Installed in the center of the room, the structure held objects that were sparsely arranged on its exterior walls: security-tag keychains, screen-printed socks, elbow-length gloves, crossword-puzzle-lotto-scratch cards. The glassed-in countertop displays featured neatly arranged clothing with several printed motifs. TV screens embedded in two sides of the kiosk played a looping video.
Katayoon Yousefbigloo, Kiosk (detail), 2025. Photo by Dennis Ha.
The video is based on Yousefbigloo’s experience moving P.L.U.R.O.M.A. to The Polygon, which came with some critique. In the lead-up to P.L.U.R.O.M.A. Resort, Liquidation World’s front window was repeatedly tagged with the words “sellout $cum.” Yousefbigloo quickly incorporated the tag into her own work, using it as a slogan on T-shirts and other merch. In the video, Yousefbigloo plays four characters—the Vandal, Security, the Pedestrian, and the Coworker—as they interact with the vandalized window one by one, each dressed in a signature P.L.U.R.O.M.A. look. In reenacting and stylizing the incident, Yousefbigloo turns the accusation of selling out into a kind of inside joke. The very thing intended to threaten her connection to community is used to reaffirm that she belongs, and to further mythologize her social circle. Many of the garments and accessories seen in the video were physically present in other parts of the kiosk display, and multiples were sold in a “Blowout Sale” closing event for the exhibition. The myth created by the video thus enters everyday reality through retail distribution.
A Maior, Fall/Winter, 2023–24. Photo by Dennis Ha.
Situated between A Maior’s billboards, Yousefbigloo’s Kiosk was an island in the center of the room. The gallery had the appearance of an otherworldly shopping center; an eerie blue light glowed from the base of Yousefbigloo’s installation, complementing the cold lighting in Yu Yan’s fridge and bridging the distance between the two artists’ works. The artists engage with retail signifiers to both poke fun at and embrace the desires underlying fashion’s artifice—to be liked and accepted, seen as beautiful or cool, or garner a sense of belonging. Zhu has previously described fashion as something “meant to produce movement and foster desire,” as opposed to the notion that art expresses “Truth.” Fashion’s symbols are only loosely tied to truth or morality, playing instead on collective desires, fears, and curiosities. In many ways, A Maior and Yousefbigloo turn to fashion to access these more elastic modes of meaning-making.
As Demi Whispy proposes, Yousefbigloo and A Maior draw on the immaterial forces of style to generate tangible consequences. Locating their work at the nexus where fashion meets its consumers—the billboard and the retail counter—A Maior and Yousefbigloo play up the paradox of defining oneself through what can be bought and sold. Yet their self-reflexive, stylized myths produce actual opportunities for belonging and self-definition. Wishing on My Falsies is a look at the alchemical outcome of making a real wish on false lashes.
