Power Exchange Rate

January 14 - February 21, 2026

UNDERSTORY presents Power Exchange Rate, an interdisciplinary group exhibition curated by Susan Snipes. From January 14 to February 21, 2026, the exhibition examines how intimacy is shaped, regulated, and contested within the structures of capital and control. Through a feminist and queer lens, this exhibition traces how personal experiences—relationships, gender, pleasure, and the body—are pulled into broader economic and political systems. It exposes intimacy as a site of exchange. These works show how systems of control shape, regulate, and commodify personal experience.

The exhibition brings together works that blur the boundaries between pleasure and power, autonomy and control, objecthood and agency. Lauren Poretsky’s whips made of paper currency transform financial capital into erotic instruments. Violet Maimbourg’s illuminated armoire, filled with hormone vials, prosthetics, and cast fragments, discloses the rituals of gender affirmation to public view. S. Brown’s vivid photo series uses birth control objects to point to how personal choices entangle with laws and cultural pressures. AnneMarie’s text-based works reclaim religious language historically used to control queer and trans bodies, using labor-intensive craft processes to confront the power of scripture and its role in shaping identity. Emily Fontana draws from consumer culture to examine how expectations around love, desire, and relationships are constructed, marketed, and internalized.

A central idea runs through the exhibition: the language of capital infiltrates the language of love, care, and sex. Drawing from the work of Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, and Lauren Berlant, Power Exchange Rate suggests that intimacy itself has become a currency as it circulates through systems that seek to regulate and profit from it.

In a time of escalating desire to control bodies, reproductive rights, and gender expression, the exhibition positions intimacy as both a site of resistance and a field of negotiation. It asks how we love, care, and desire within a world that is constantly trying to own the terms.

UNDERSTORY is dedicated to exhibiting interdisciplinary and conceptual work by regional and emerging artists, fostering experimental practice, critical dialogue, and community engagement.

Join us for the opening reception of Power Exchange Rate on Wednesday, January 14, from 5–8 PM at UNDERSTORY, located on the RAMP (lower level) at 78th Street Studios in Cleveland.