Soft Slaughter

Soft Slaughter, 2026

Wool, Foam, Water of Lake Michigan, MX Dye, Acrylic Airbrush Color, Tiger’s Eye, Embroidery Floss, Beads, Sequins

Gutted autumn deer hang from the garage rafters, geese harvested from the sky lay in a pile, a temporary monument preserved in the winter air. What was earlier an act of violence will become how my family is fed that night. Familiar scenes from growing up rural and midwestern become a backdrop for both nostalgia and surviving childhood, local color and outgrowing the sociopolitical nearsidedness a farm town upbringing affords.

Interweaving the personal and the political, Soft Slaughter reimagines this place in sculptures of felt, clay, and found materials, inviting the viewer to walk alongside artist Johanna Rae Wyss as she reconciles her recall and identity. Animal carcasses dangle in position to be butchered in wool and embroidery. Mounted animal heads line the wall, allegorical sculptures telling stories not of man’s conquest of his world, but of social liberation and queer feminine upheaval. A space we traditionally understand to uphold machismo has been reclaimed in iconography of the queer and the feminine with a touch of the surreal.

Tableau

In Progress-White Tail Deer

Detail-King Salmon

Mallard Duck

Bluegill, pair

Entrail and Blood Detail

Process-Harvesting Water from Lake Michigan for Felt

Process- Salmon Wet Felting