Jade Smrz — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Jade Smrz

(Art and Technology MFA 25)
https://www.jadelucia.com/

Nascent Chimera, 2025

Jade Smrz’s practice investigates queer and trans ways of freedom and expression through new mythologies that reclaim figures historically used to mark bodies as monstrous or aberrant. The chimera’s hybrid form refuses singular classification, embodying what Smrz describes as ‘the body in flux’ — constantly shifting self-perceptions that morph the mirror image from day to day, from moment to moment. Nascent Chimera presents a small wall-mounted soft-body sculpture of a fetal chimera wrapped in on itself, featuring human and non-human animal characteristics with an ‘umbilical cord’ hanging to the floor. Smrz uses needle felting’s labor-intensive process to create soft sculptures that privilege touch and material accumulation, building forms through repeated gesture and attention. The work explores the transfeminine body and its relationship to power, myth, and world-making, using needle-felted wool to create forms that investigate the body’s mutability — the way it ages, plays, develops, and decays. The fetal posture suggests burgeoning ways of being and embodies the process of becoming rather than presenting as already formed. The sculpture finds softness and vulnerability in the monstrous, blurring the barrier between the contrived internal self and the muddy, intersectional pieces that constitute a body and its exterior place in the world. The umbilical cord, extending from wall to floor, emphasizes connection and interdependence. Bodies are born through relationships with environments, technologies, and the systems that sustain or constrain them.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025