Flesh, Fixture, Feeling

ELLIOT DOUGHTIE, DANNI O’BRIEN AND OLIVIA ZUBKO 

Runs / Sept 5 – Sept 28, 2025

Reception / Friday, Sept 5, 6-9 PM

Hours: Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

This September Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present Flesh, Fixture, Feeling, a three-person exhibition by Elliot Doughtie, Danni O’Brien, and Olivia Zubko. Within the intimate architecture of the home, we construct, deconstruct, and negotiate who we are. This exhibition reimagines how domestic and shared spaces shape identity formation and transformation. These private realms, such as the bathroom, the home gym, and the bedroom, serve as sanctuaries for daily rituals, sites of vulnerability, and thresholds for becoming. In contrast, shared spaces like locker rooms increase exposure and anxiety, demanding discretion as a means of survival. Through various forms of sculpture, each artist examines how public and private spaces reflect, challenge, and complicate our shifting identities.

Elliot Doughtie queers the locker room and bathroom from spaces of anticipation and anxiety into scenes of tenderness, ecstasy, and personal metamorphosis. His interdisciplinary sculptures confront the rough edges of industrial materials to evoke the soft, ever-changing trans body, rejecting binaries and proposing new possibilities for bodily knowledge. 

Danni O’Brien’s assemblages, constructed from scavenged domestic debris, become speculative, cyborg forms that are fragile, queer, and interdependent. These bodies-in-flux rely on each other, reflecting the need for mutual care in a dystopian present. Her hybrid forms emphasize queer futures by blurring the line between organic and inorganic, the familiar and the strange.

Olivia Zubko’s porcelain sculptures reimagine bathroom fixtures as delicate, haunting witnesses to daily rituals of care, illness, shame, and healing. Drawing from the long history of “bathers” in art history, Zubko’s work re-centers these objects as active participants in our personal stories, framing the bathroom as a stage where we perform private acts to discover ourselves.

Through material intimacy, speculative form, and quiet ritual, Doughtie, O’Brien, and Zubko invite us to reconsider the architecture of identity itself, asking: What does it mean to feel at home in one’s body? In doing so, the exhibition suggests that transformation is not only possible but also ongoing, messy, and deeply embedded in the spaces we inhabit every day.

Artist Bios:

Elliot Doughtie (Baltimore, MD) works in drawing, sculpture, and installation, with a desire to form intimate relationships between common objects and the awkward reality of having a body. He has been in many exhibitions including venues such as: L’OEil du Poisson (Quebec City, Quebec), Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX), LangerOverDickie (Chicago, IL), Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (Arlington, VA), and School 33 (Baltimore,MD) among others. Doughtie has a BA from Tulane University, a MFA from Mount Royal School of Art at MICA, and is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant.

Danni O’Brien (Baltimore, MD) assembles a reservoir of images, objects, and material to concoct amalgamated sculptures and reliefs. Her works have been exhibited at venues such as Current Space, Hamiltonian Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Tephra Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been awarded residencies with PLOP, The Wassaic Project, Art Farm, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Baltimore Clayworks, and Stove Works, among others. O’Brien is a recipient of a 2022 Belle Foundation for Cultural Development Individual Artist Grant and a 2024 Individual Artist Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Olivia Zubko is a Chicago-based artist who works primarily in sculpture, utilizing ceramic, fibers, and found materials. She received her BFA in sculpture in 2020 from Northern Illinois University. Her work has recently been exhibited at The Arts Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL), The Plan (Chicago, IL), Gallery 350 (Malé, Maldives), McHenry County College (Crystal Lake, IL), DeGroot Fine Art (Chicago, IL), LEFT FIELD (Los Osos, CA), NADA House 2023 (New York, NY), and NADA Miami 2023 (Miami, FL). Her work has also been featured in Create! Magazine and Red Skate Mag. She is a current fellow at The Arts Club of Chicago.