Even Bad Girls Get the Blues is a rapture of feminine pop power refracted through the gaze of a generation coming of age on the internet.

Siena Barnes’ ink drawings celebrate queer icons who, like goddesses, challenge the status quo and take up more space than society would care to permit. The work riffs on camp, defined in “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural”, where authenticity is revealed through artifice.

As notions of the feminine evolve, the Venusian ideal expands to include the stars of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, trans and nonbinary beauties. In the vein of Velazquez’s “The Toilet of Venus,” notions of the gaze are complicated by internet content creators behind and in front of the lens. Who is looking at who?

The artist spotlights subjects who return the gaze in an emboldened blend of grrl power.