How To Escape a Whirlpool and The Logic of Fixation

Continuing with celebrities, Laura Collins and Jackson Daughety turn to figures whose entire existences are shaped by being watched publicly. Drawing from reality TV and influencer culture—forms of entertainment built on the promise of unfiltered access—they depict people who have willingly turned their lives into something to be consumed. Collins’s paintings present three Real Housewives—Porsha Williams, Dorinda Medley, and Tamra Judge—each caught mid-action, speaking and pointing. While Dorinda is pointing to herself, Porsha and Tamra point to someone outside of the frame, and standing in front of them, we become the ones singled out. In contrast, Jackson Daughety's MrBeast Super Bowl Halftime Show (2025) leaves its subject out entirely. The YouTuber is nowhere in sight; Daughety paints the crowd instead. Bodies and flags blur into a spectacle of collective attention, with thousands of people performing their obsession for a figure we can't see. In both works, the image matters less than the attention around it. Obsession no longer depends on intimacy or even proximity; it depends on the constant circulation of images that keeps viewers looking.

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Noel W. Anderson narrows down the spectacle to a single individual. Fan-Addict 5 (2023) depicts a cheering figure in motion with his hands raised and his head duplicated as he seems to be jumping up and down. Across the surface there are scraps of an eye, lips, and numbers fragmenting. Where Daughety's crowd performs its obsession collectively; Anderson shows what it costs the obsessive: the looker coming apart under the force of his own looking. The crowd has disappeared, leaving only the fan and the image that has begun to overtake him.

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Aaron Michael Skolnick and Katherine Sepúlveda turn that same compulsive attention inwards. In the series Liza Performing in Cabaret (2026), Skolnick stages a slow synthesis through the three works. Starting with Liza Minnelli’s portrait, as we move through each piece, his own face begins to emerge through the layers of oil on linen. First one eye, then two, then the shape of his beard. Despite not seeing Skolnick fully merge into Minnelli, the full morphing feels inevitable. Skolnick lets Liza dissolve into his own image; Minnelli’s identity is blurred, as if the sustained looking has begun to erode the distance between the two.

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Where Skolnick dissolves into his object of devotion, Sepúlveda builds a shrine around hers. In Soft Girls (2025), nude bodies, intimate objects, crosses, and references to television shows and books—elements of her life and mind—are jammed into a neon landscape. It’s not a portrait of any one fixation but the sum of them, her own interiority turned inside out. The person at the center is the one thing she never depicts; we read her through the pile she's assembled around herself.

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How To Escape a Whirlpool never answers its own question, and I don't think it ever intended to. The artists are trapped in a loop; you see it in the repetition of Orli Swergold's spiral-like figures or the hundreds of glass beads Anna Pederson threads into Horse Gates (2026). The show puts you in that position too—Britney stares at you mid-breakdown, and Collins's housewives point you out. Daughety folds you into his crowd—you don't escape the whirlpool.