Ballroom culture as imagined through 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings is front and center in Jamie Vasta’s fifth exhibition with PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY. It’s with immense pleasure we present House of Roses, a celebration of the shimmering, diverse expressions of queer identity. The composite glitter portraits draw inspiration from the opulence, bearing, and metaphor found in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Rousing in lush outdoor environs and restaged with queer identities in full bloom, Vasta’s ficitve family are gorgeous, tattooed, costumed, commanding and heralded by community—they refuse the lassitudes of erasure and closeted thinking.

As a queer youth growing up in Rochester, New York, Vasta found hope and inspiration in Paris Is Burning—a film that elevates queerness as jubilant, communal, and fierce. Vasta’s imaginary family portraits in House of Roses pay homage to and expand in portraiture the legacy of Black and Latinx communities who built ballroom as a site of chosen family, safety, resilience, and performance, enshrining the courage and intention of their vision as well as the limitless diversity of queer experience.

Known for her contemporary figurative “paintings” made entirely of bombastic bits of glitter and a little glue, Vasta reimagines art history with a queer lens. In her first exhibition Mustn’t in 2007, Vasta reframed Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales depicting a mystical landscape where women with supernatural powers cavort in deadly play. Vasta’s second exhibition reflects the trophy portrait in glitter, this time with internet composites of adolescent females posed with their kill.  Vasta then presented After Caravaggio – a contemporary reframing of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s historic paintings where she posed her coterie of friends and colleagues with contemporary props, turning gender and context on end. After the Hudson River School positioned Vasta’s glitter on wood landscapes in the traditions of 19th century landscape painting. Now Vasta turns to the sensorial visuals of the Pre-Raphaelites in House of Roses, a celebration of trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid as icons of beauty, sensuality and self-possession as much at home in the natural world as voguing in the ballroom. Flowing drapery in luminous glitter mirror Vasta’s operatic revelry and imposing gravity. A Vision of Fiammetta, after Rossetti, is almost ambrosial, a stately genderfluid portrait, obliquely referencing the original painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1898). Vasta’s Vision of Fiammetta strikes a direct, unyielding gaze, embraced by exquisite red roses in a deep verdant garden.