Dream Girls and Stitched Selves
On the layered power and presence of Tschabalala Self’s constructed women
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to construct a self—how we build identity through gesture, memory, fabric, and sometimes sheer will. Tschabalala Self’s Dream Girl, currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, gave me a lot to sit with. The exhibition closes this Saturday, April 26, and if you haven’t seen it yet, go. If you have, maybe this piece will give you a reason to return—or reflect differently. Either way, this review is for the stitched selves in all of us.
In Dream Girl, Tschabalala Self turns the gallery into a dreamscape where femininity is stitched, staged, and made undeniably present. Her first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, Dream Girl draws from the city’s mythology—its promise of reinvention, its Hollywood-scale illusions, its seductive duality. Self draws from the myth-soaked fantasy of Los Angeles, presenting Black women as authors of their own image—figures who refuse containment and command attention on their own terms. The freedom L.A. represents—a freedom that's both romantic and dystopic—emerges in the larger-than-life scale of the work. These women take up space unapologetically. Their visual assertiveness requires distance, a step back, just to take them in—offering a direct challenge to the ways Black women’s presence is often misread as too much, too loud, too bold. These are not passive portraits; they’re declarations stitched into being.
Self’s figures are not born—they’re built. Literally sewn together from printed fabrics, painted surfaces, and stitched outlines, they embody a visual language of assembly. This process isn’t just aesthetic—it’s conceptual. In constructing her subjects from disparate parts, Self emphasizes that identity, especially femininity, is not fixed or natural, but performed, curated, and composed. Her work channels what theorist Judith Butler describes as gender’s “stylized repetition of acts”—a performance so seamless it reads as truth. But here, the seams are visible. The stitches don’t hide the construction—they announce it. These women are self-fashioned, self-authored, and visibly made. It’s an invitation to rethink what is considered whole, what is considered feminine, and who gets to control the narrative of either.
In Dream Girl, Self explores the tension between visibility and legibility—a dynamic Saidiya Hartman has called central to the representation of Black life. The women in these works are fully rendered and visually commanding, but they resist easy narrative clarity. You see them, but you don’t get to know them—not fully, not on demand. Hartman warns against the violence of overexposure, the way Black women’s bodies have historically been made available for consumption, interpretation, and control. Self’s figures push back. They assert presence without offering explanation. Like Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” Self’s images don’t aim to complete a story or satisfy an outside gaze. Instead, they create space for imagined interiority—for lives shaped by agency, not assumption.
The title work, Dream Girl (2025), unfurls across a 96-inch canvas like a vision you can touch—stitched, painted, and pieced together from scraps of texture and intent. Her body, constructed from swatches of patterned fabric, oil pastel, and colored pencil, pulses with color and contradiction. She is not a dream in the passive, projected sense. She is the architect of her own image—built from excess, from ornament, from labor. The visible seams don’t conceal—they declare. Like a dress turned inside out, the work reveals the process of becoming: messy, deliberate, unapologetic. The figure meets your gaze not with invitation, but with command. This is where Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance materializes—Self doesn’t just depict femininity as constructed, she constructs it, layer by layer, stitch by stitch, until the body becomes both surface and depth.
In The Supplicant (2025), a woman kneels—not in prayer, but in a posture of provocation. Her spine curves like a question mark—open, vulnerable, but never powerless. Composed of dyed canvas, painted surface, and bold outlines, her body is stitched into being with an intimacy that refuses pity. The title might suggest surrender, but her energy is more complex: the pose reads less like a plea and more like a performance of power through yielding—a nod to the dom/sub dynamic where control is often coded into the act of giving in. Her stillness hums with intent. Submission becomes choreography—what Judith Butler might call gender’s ritual repetition, and what Erving Goffman would frame as roleplay for an audience that may or may not deserve the show. Nothing in Self’s practice is accidental; every seam, every swatch, is placed with precision. She is not collapsing beneath the weight of femininity—she’s holding it, rearranging it, re-performing it. And in doing so, she dares the viewer to mistake stillness for silence, softness for surrender.
If The Supplicant is a performance of power through stillness, Rosehip (2025) is a study in softness enacted through subtle gesture. The figure leans forward, standing with a gentle curve in her back, as if reaching to pluck one of the painted blooms that frame her. Her hips swell generously, grounding her in the scene with a quiet sensuality—not posed, but present. Her hair hangs softly as she bends, a small but deliberate detail that underscores the unforced intimacy of the moment. There’s a tenderness in this motion, an intimacy in her engagement with the floral forms around her. The title evokes the fruit of the rose—a swollen bud, an after-flower—and that doubling feels deliberate. Beauty after bloom. Ripeness as a form of knowing. In Rosehip, Self allows Black femininity to move through the world with weight and grace, ornament and purpose. The body becomes a vessel for care and sensual attention—constructed not for the gaze, but for the moment itself.
The lone sculpture in the exhibition, Flower Girl (2024), sits slightly apart from the canvases but radiates with the same constructed power. Cast in a rich bronze hue and perched on a white base, her body carries weight—both literal and symbolic. Her elongated neck evokes the stylized grace of traditional African sculpture, particularly the Ndebele, where adornment and posture express identity, status, and self-definition. Her hair, fashioned from white and gold flowers, forms a kind of ceremonial crown—echoing the florals seen in works like Rosehip, but here blooming into quiet monumentality. The title Flower Girl might conjure the image of a child preceding a bride, a decorative prelude to someone else’s ceremony. But here, she is no preamble. She is the moment. Sculpted in full, sovereign form, she subverts the role—elevating what is typically seen as sweet and secondary into something central and stately. Her three-dimensionality shifts the encounter: you move around her, measure your own body against hers. She invites not just viewing, but presence. In a room built on layered surfaces, Flower Girl becomes the anchor—tactile, upright, and regal. A vision of Black femininity sculpted not in service of the gaze, but in celebration of being seen.
Timeless (2025) is the final breath of the exhibition, and its most radiant. Set against a luminous yellow-gold background and framed by two white columns, the figure reclines with one arm and one leg lifted into the air, her head resting in the hand of her opposite arm, fingers softly pressing into her face. The gesture is almost theatrical—a moment of pause, of contemplation, or perhaps self-admiration. She is languid but alert, body arched like punctuation, suspended mid-performance. Unlike the other works, Timeless includes a black shadow, stark and deliberate, anchoring her to the space while gesturing toward something beyond it. Self has called her “a performer,” one whose beauty was captivating throughout her time. But the shadow insists that this is not just about beauty—it’s about presence, about memory, about what endures. The gold backdrop gleams like a halo. The columns recall a temple. This is no passing fantasy; this is canon. Timeless becomes a self-portrait of Black femininity in full command of her image—performing, yes, but never for your approval. Her performance is her practice. Her body is her archive. And her presence, like the title insists, is anything but temporary.
Across Dream Girl, Tschabalala Self reclaims the image of the Black woman from the inside out—reconstructing her, stitching her, sculpting her into forms that refuse erasure or simplification. These women embody femininity not as something inherited, but something assembled, chosen, and constantly reimagined. Whether reclining in golden light or sitting in bronze stillness, they confront the viewer on their own terms. They perform, but never for spectacle. They pose, but never for permission. In a cultural landscape still learning to make room for unapologetic Black womanhood, Dream Girl isn’t just a dream—it’s a declaration of autonomy, beauty, and becoming.