Acid Bath House, curated by Jarrett Earnest
Nina Johnson is proud to present Acid Bath House, a group exhibition curated by Jarrett Earnest.
“Men awkwardly crowd around a waiting room, entering one by one into the even smaller room where you can pay the entry. The tab of acid I’d taken must have already begun to hit because the guy looked me over and asked, Do you know where you are? So simple as to seem like some kind of trick question. Does he mean, like, in this material realm? Or, that I’m in Washington DC? I hesitated too long and then tried, A bathhouse. —Works for me, and he hands me a towel and key to a locker.
Even by bathhouse standards this one is kind of gross, and I feel incredibly aware of its grossness—that pervasive mildewy-sweaty smell, a carpeted (!) lounge with pleather furniture and giant TVs playing gay porn, a rabbit’s warren of small rooms, empty save narrow wipeable “beds”—but I’m also feeling wave upon wave of bodily euphoria that transforms my experience with a sensuous glamour.
Sitting in the dry sauna the solemn dudes gradually peel out because of my giggling. Wow I must be annoying, and try a bit harder to keep it together. But the air feels so good! I enter an exhibitionist’s dream: a string of shower heads lining one side of an open space. When hot water starts pouring over me its as though I’m dissolving into water and air, like an ice cube dancing in a skillet. I am in a fucking Herbal Essences commercial!
Mostly everyone is grim and serious, high on the toxic combination of masculinity and anonymity—which inevitably generates scary effects. Touring the dim steam room, the dark corridors with weird reddish mood lighting, makes the whole place feel laced with promise and threat like an erotic bardo—the suspended interval between death and rebirth, in which all the trappings of the material world and the certainty of a ‘self’ are lost in the process of transformation
The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the passage of a soul through an amorphous atemporal landscape, with all manner of inexplicable atmospheric outbursts, alternately terrifying and seductive, meant to distract, detour, detain. It advises remembering that ‘you have no physical body of flesh and blood, so whatever sounds, colors and rays of light occur, they cannot hurt you and you cannot die. It is enough simply to recognize them as your projections.’ This floating attitude is highly advisable when acid is peaking, and also for life in general—which is the real point, that all is transient all the time.
Looking at everyone there, so temporarily on this planet, in this goofy place all trying to get off, fills me with tenderness, with the literal nakedness of desire and our various attempts to connect. Pleasure. If extended beyond a body, does ‘queerness’ still exist? Is it a force? Does it push toward liberation, toward fluidity and change, or is it too easily mired in defining architectures of privilege to get out of its own way? Can we separate queerness from ‘identity’ as it currently functions? And, if so, should we?
In my experience, in places where queer people come together—a sex club, dance floor, an art gallery, a camp out, —and in the things queer people make with and for each other, there is a specific energy that everyone needs if we are to survive on this planet together. The possibility of queer life is psychedelic erotica.
Whatever that might be, its appearance will necessarily take many forms, and it must take even more and newer forms as the darkness consolidates around us, as conformity becomes legally coerced and brutally enforced. This might be explicit, it might be abstract, it might be rainbow-colored or mirrored or glittering or velvety or forged in chainmail or rescued from the trash—as long as it is beautiful, pleasurable, and free.” – Jarrett Earnest
Participating artists include Steven Arnold, Belasco, Sean Bennett, Anna Betbeze, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Jake Brush, Matt Connors, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, TM Davy, Johnnie Gardner, Jesse Genepi, Sadao Hasegawa, Juliana Huxtable, Savannah Knoop, Keith Lafuente, Moses Leonardo, Chris Martin, Reuben Paterson, Yuval Pudik, Lee Relvas, Dean Sameshima, Laurel Sparks, Paula Gately Tillman, Chris Udemezue, Nicole Wittenberg, and Carrie Yamaoka.
Acid Bath House will be on view in the Front Gallery at Nina Johnson through February 14, 2026.
