Wicked Game

Wicked Game brings together new paintings by Annabelle Parrish and Jordan Sears, two artists whose works explore seduction, performance, and the unstable power dynamics embedded within looking. The title operates as both metaphor and framework: a reference to desire as performance, but also to hunting, pursuit, and the shifting relationship between predator and prey. Across Parrish’s paintings in particular, bodies appear staged, exposed, or suspended within ambiguous scenarios that oscillate between empowerment and vulnerability. The women in these works are never entirely passive — they seduce, confront, and perform — yet they also appear watched, pursued, or offered up to the gaze. Desire becomes transactional, theatrical, and sometimes dangerous. Drawing from visual languages associated with noir cinema, staged photography, true crime imagery, advertisements, and personal memory, both artists manipulate familiar imagery into scenes that feel psychologically charged and emotionally elusive. Humor, tension, glamour, and menace coexist within highly controlled surfaces. Parrish’s paintings embrace an exaggerated theatricality, where sensuality becomes inseparable from discomfort. Suggestive gestures create images that feel simultaneously intimate and artificial, as though frozen mid-scene within a larger unseen narrative. Jordan Sears’ paintings resemble translucent fabrics clinging to wet skin — surfaces suspended between concealment and revelation. Figures emerge and dissolve through thin layers of color, as if seen through water, sweat, plastic, or synthetic veils. Her compositions compress and abstract the body until it becomes uncertain whether we are looking at flesh, reflection, fabric, or memory itself. Seduction in these works is inseparable from distance: the image invites proximity while continually slipping out of focus. Together, the works in Wicked Game examine the erotic as a site of projection, control, vulnerability, and performance — where power constantly shifts hands, and where the line between hunter and hunted becomes impossible to fully locate.