| Artist grouping of 4 panels, oil on panel, 10 in. x 10 in., 2026 |
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| Josie Girand
Slut Heaven
May 7 - June 6, 2026
Opening Reception
Thursday May 7
6 - 8 p.m.
Artist in Discussion
Wednesday May 13
5 - 7 p.m. Gallery Hours
Thursday - Sunday
12 - 6 p.m. Please join us Thursday, May 7th from 6 - 8 p.m. for the opening reception of New York based painter Josie Girand’s exhibition Slut Heaven, a series of new paintings.
In Slut Heaven, Girand exposes the tension between the affective nuance of romantic experience and what in contemporary culture could best be called: the post-intimacy, grand summary; the societal tendency to force intimate experiences into digestible frameworks in a futile attempt to analyze and categorize connection. The show upends the notion of creating a neat and clean spreadsheet of love, exposing the true porousness of the delineations between regret and reverie, shame and eros.
In the individual paintings, Girand reveals only a portion of her scenes and figures, each painting depicting a subtle glimpse—an eye and a cheek—which may only allude to how the subject feels, never confirm. Girand uses a palette that favors rosy pinks and diaphanous violets that seem to have been sponged from the horizon at twilight, ethereal hues courting the Belt of Venus. Kaleidoscopic, intimate, and flashing, the paintings lure us into the murky emotional depths of some cavernous memory before sending us back out, atop an ever-shifting tidal mood. By virtue of the paintings’ aggregate grid-like effect, Girand offers up a Rubik’s Cube of amorous meaning. |
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| Slut Heaven, oil on panel, 36 in. x 36 in., 2026 |
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| In her interview with Girand, writer Julie Schulte asks, “The title Slut Heaven is layered with meaning. While it speaks to erotic bliss and the possibility for transcendence it also alludes to an afterlife—a realm reached only through death. Could you elaborate on the personal significance of this title?”
Girand responds, “Slut is a pretty vague insult. What does that even mean? I feel like everyone has their own standards of what constitutes a slut. For example, my grandmother will probably have a very different description of a slut than I do. The first time someone called me a slut, I was so confused, like, who, me? I was thinking of the way these pure feelings of pleasure and joy get corrupted, by jealousy, ego, shame, controlling societal values. People over complicate things that could be so simple and glorious. So I was thinking of a place where the sluts were free to float around and be happy. They are no longer on earth, but in ‘slut heaven,’ finally able to experience joys and sorrows through their own eyes, without a man-made lens.” |
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| Artist grouping of 9 panels, oil on panel, 15 in. 15 in., 2026 |
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| Julie Schulte continues her inquiry, “You’ve described these paintings as diaristic snapshots. This brings to mind Wittgenstein’s famous line, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” I wonder if, even in the private act of recording our lives, the moment we use language we risk losing the experience to the misleading path of narrative—moving further from the truth. Could you discuss your daily painting practice and how color and imagery offer a type of revelation that a written journal might not?”
Girand replies, “While I was making these paintings, I was falling in love with someone. A lot of these were made crouched on my floor, while he was sleeping on my twin mattress right next to me, also on the floor. Often while painting I was trying to depict the way I felt during our sex, just in a beautiful, light filled void. Simply because that’s just what was on my mind.” |
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| Starlings, oil on panel, 10 in. x 8 in., 2026 |
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| Friedrich Nietzsche’s Aphorism 296 in Beyond Good and Evil offers a theoretical orientation:
“And it is only your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have the colour, many colours perhaps, many many-coloured tendernesses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: — but no one will divine from these how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!”
Just as Nietzsche subverts the moral binary in favor of a chromatic scale of human experience, through capturing the complex shades of a person, Girand positions herself not as subject to totality and grand pronouncements, but as a supplicant to the embodied moment itself, transmuting all “wicked thoughts” to polychromatic tenderness. |
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| | The artist Josie Girand in her bedroom, East Village, New York City, 2026 |
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| Josie Girand (b. 2000, New York, NY) is an American artist based in New York City. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art and Philosophy from Kenyon College. Her surreal painting and drawing practice plays with the intersection of fantasy and femininity, confronting her own private mythologies, ritual and idolatries. Her first solo show with the gallery in 2025, Comic Show, used humor and absurdity to reclaim girlhood sexuality, drawing on Kristeva’s theory of the abject to transform scenes of longing into narratives of self-estrangement. This is her second show with Psychic Readings*. |
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| Slut Heaven is on view through June 6, 2026. |
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| | | | Psychic Readings* 629 E 6th St New York NY 10009
tel: 212-598-1110
email: psychicreadingsgallery@gmail.com
Gallery Hours
Thursday - Sunday from 12 - 6 PM
and by appointment |
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