— End feature —
She lowered the paper. Her eyes were the color of wet slate. "You mean the spankings? Or the visibility?"
Droo-Cynthia sat on a simple wooden stool in the center of the room, wearing a gray linen shift. She was not roped off. There was no pedestal. She was reading a newspaper.
This is where the gallery becomes uncomfortable—deliberately so. Drawing 153–23–09, "Over the Armchair of Revision" , shows Droo-Cynthia draped across a Victorian bergère. Her face is turned toward the viewer. She is not weeping. She is counting. Her lips form the number fourteen . Droo-cynthia-visits-the-spankers-drawings-gallery-153-23
I approached. "Does it hurt," I asked, "to be drawn like this?"
For the uninitiated, the Spankers’ Drawings Gallery exists in a liminal pocket of the city—partway between a Victorian conservatory and a defunct server farm. Its current exhibition, numbered 153–23 (the “23” denotes the twenty-third iteration of their “Persistence of Discipline” cycle), features the enigmatic patron and frequent subject Droo-Cynthia. I attended a private viewing. I left with more questions than answers, and a peculiar urge to sit on a pillow.
The opening drawing, charcoal on stretched drumhead (dated 153–23–01), is deceptively delicate. It depicts Droo-Cynthia’s back from the shoulders to the knees. Her spine is a river. Her shoulder blades, twin islands. Across the landscape of her lower back, a hand has written the word "Because" in reverse—as if seen in a mirror. — End feature — She lowered the paper
I bought a bar of lavender soap shaped like a handprint. The Tocker wrapped it in tissue and whispered, "Use it before a difficult conversation."
The largest work in the show, "The Gallery Watches the Gallery" (153–23–17), is a panoramic mural done in sanguine and sepia. It depicts this very gallery. In the mural, a crowd of faceless patrons stands before a drawing of Droo-Cynthia. But inside that drawing, a smaller Droo-Cynthia stands before a mirror. And inside the mirror, a tiny Tocker points at the viewer.
She folded the newspaper carefully. "The spankings are choreography. The visibility is the actual punishment." She stood, turned her back to me, and lifted her shift just above the knee. There were no marks. No welts. Only faint, intersecting lines—like longitude and latitude. Or the visibility
And indeed, looking closely, you see the grain of the paper is bruised—pressed so hard in places that the fibers have split. The drawing is a scar.
"The Scribe erased them," she said. "That’s the deal. The drawings keep the sting. My skin forgets." She let the shift fall. "Which do you think is crueler?"