Carrie Riehl shaved off her eyebrows in early June. I know this because I saw it on Instagram, where Riehl maintains — stars in, really — an art-drenched, visually provocative account.
By the standards of someone who's always a nipple or a pubic hair away from being thrown off the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, the eyebrow episode seemed demure. She posts often, and her aesthetic is distinctive: lots of breasts, legs, mouths, spit, hair and fashion. Most of all, lots of Carrie Riehl. Instagram has deleted several of her accounts over the past few years — one, somewhat awkwardly, while it was a "Recommended" page. Each time, she has resurfaced within a few days, under a different name. Her followers — on her latest account, h2.0, a couple of thousand and counting — have little trouble finding her again.
I met with Riehl a few days after her eyebrows vanished to discuss That Used to Be Us, the art show she was curating — her first — at Haw Contemporary. Riehl, who is 23, lives with her girlfriend and frequent collaborator, Emily Kenyon, in an apartment on a friendly block in the gentrifying Historic Northeast. Some of Riehl's friends — mostly students and recent graduates, like Riehl, of the Kansas City Art Institute — were hanging out on the front stoop, grilling vegetable kebabs, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes.
She welcomed me inside, and I mentioned her eyebrows. "Right," she said. I asked how long she thought it would take for them to grow back. "I'll let you know," she said.
A little while later, a friend of hers arrived and said, "Your eyebrows! They're gone!"
"No way," she said, her voice droll to the point of boredom.
Later, she told me that she shaved off her eyebrows with the hope that they would grow back thicker than before. "I also kind of want a unibrow," she added, smiling.
Riehl and her photography convey the strong sense that anything resembling a norm or a social more — particularly in the realm of bodies, sex and gender — requires, at a minimum, reconsideration, if not a permanent trip to the garbage bin. Good luck not feeling square or prudish in the company of the artist or her art, which includes whatever she may have done to her body that day. On Instagram and in Bohemian, the publication that she edits with Kenyon, she has honed a talent for taking photos of herself that brim with messages about fashion, sexuality and the grotesque, often in the same image.
Among her more confrontational images: Riehl in a plain white shirt in which two tiny holes have been cut, so all you see are her nipples poking through; Riehl wearing an open kimono showing almost all of her breasts and torso, her unshaved leg in the foreground (caption: "Your daily reminder that hairy women are beautiful too"); a smearing of menstrual blood on her upper leg with the caption "I'm so sorry if I'm alienating some of you! Your whole fucking culture alienates me."
In person, Riehl does not come across as especially alienated. She's friendly, eager to talk art and theory, openly ambitious. She has a subtle Valley-girl lilt to her voice and is as likely to call something or someone "supercute" as she is to bring up "gender binary" — as she did while enthusiastically telling me about the works she had selected for That Used To Be Us.
"It's all female artists, though I don't really think of it as a woman's show," she said. "I think if there's a unifying thing, it's all artists with kind of an activist presence who are creating work about how identity — whether through gender, relationships, infrastructure, politics, family, whatever — is changing in their cultures."
She continued: "Early on, the plan was to ask local artists to contribute original work exploring some of the topics I was interested in for the show. Then I realized I wanted to include artists who were already working in this territory. So I just started contacting artists whose work I admired — some from the Internet, some from Instagram, some from other places — and asking them if they were interested in letting me show their work."
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