Interview with Andra Nadirshah and Stevie Soares

Image courtesy of Ceradon.

Ceradon is a new gallery in the living room and stairwells of an apartment located just off North Alvarado Street in Echo Park. Founded earlier this year by Andra Nadirshah and Stevie Soares, the gallery is focused on bringing attention to trans artists working across divergent media and modalities. Both of the founders are practicing artists and hold professional roles at commercial Los Angeles galleries. As PHILTH HAUS, an “artist collective” created by Andra in which she operates as six distinct artist-personae, Andra has exhibited at institutions such as KW Institute Berlin and participated in De Ateliers Residency Program; Stevie is an abstract tattooer who also works in painting, drawing, and digital media. Andra currently works as sales director of Morán Morán, while Stevie is a Facilities Coordinator at BLUM.

I met Andra in 2022 at an opening at Human Resources of one of her three concurrent exhibitions of LYLEX 1.0, a project that involved, among other elements, a wellness product made of mushrooms that had been fed transfeminine blood. She introduced me to Stevie, and since then, the three of us have been in an ongoing conversation about art, culture, and social change, especially in relationship to the hypervisibility of trans people in the world right now (and the ways this visibility compounds and escalates the challenges facing trans people).

In a social and political environment that uses trans bodies to create polarizing tropes for political gain, Ceradon directly addresses the economic challenges faced by the transgender community, which has been historically excluded from professional spaces. Many trans people turn to creative pursuits to make a living. The gallery is working to ensure that this artistic production is recognized and valued, both for its cultural contributions and as a driver of the social change necessary to transform repressive narratives about trans individuals. For instance, the gallery’s first show, Premiere Ink, included seven trans artists who make their living tattooing. The second show, Taste and Discernment, curated with the publishing platform AQNB**, showcased Max Göran and Samuel Acevedo, whose works recontextualize the signifiers of their own marginalized social and class identities.

Ceradon positions the gallery as a place where speculative worlds based in the specificity of trans artists’ experiences can exist temporarily. Because trans people are both hypervisible and alienated from dominant societal narratives around sex, love, family, money, and community, the art made by trans people comes from a necessary and unique critical distance that has the capacity to create “whole new worlds,” to quote the late transfemme musician SOPHIE (“Promises might come true/Promises of a life uncontained,” she sings.)¹

Ceradon proposes that galleries can drive social change by enacting mutual aid and interconnectivity, community endeavors that trans people have historically practiced. Trans people have necessarily created communities that exist across time and space, finding and creating lineages with those who came before—these historical throughlines serving as essential support. Bringing this history of trans community into the gallery space, thereby creating a present-day archive, is another important part of the world-building that is central to Ceradon’s mission.

Molly Larkey: What was the initial motivation to start a gallery that centers trans people?

Andra Nadirshah: One thing I was thinking about with Ceradon is this idea of going beyond inclusion. We wanted to include trans people in the conversation, not just because they’re trans, but because we think that trans people have had to develop a radical honesty (in relation to themselves, just coming out as trans). I think that when those same people are tasked with making art, they have already honed in on an ability to make radically honest reflections of the world, and therefore produce art that is a very distilled version of reality. Stevie and I, coming to this as artists and as stewards of this project, are interested in work that is presenting a stark honesty that people are forced to contend with.

Stevie Soares: The reality for trans folks is that there’s not a seat at the table currently. That isn’t always obvious because people have interacted with trans people in a very superficial way, mediated by screens (a.k.a. media). Inviting the public into our home is one way for us to make real the lives of a few of us. [The gallery] serves as a proxy for a larger ideal where trans people are more integrated into society and not feared, tokenized, or fetishized. The gallery is an invitation and a necessary call to action, for ourselves individually and as a community. And support has come together so naturally that it has affirmed my instincts about what was so evidently lacking.

AN: The media specter of transness is like a ghost—a superficial reflection of lived experience.

SS: Yes! [The artist] Creighton Baxter has said that one of the ways trans people communicate with each other is through the art that they make, which reaches across time. When I first heard that, it rang really true for me.

ML: There are different kinds of seats at the table—you can have an individual trans artist showing in a gallery, but that doesn’t do the same thing as having a gallery that is focused on bringing trans voices into visibility and building community.

AN: Exactly. [We help facilitate] how at least some trans people get introduced or mediated through the art market. There is something important and special about how we, as trans people, are thinking about how to give trans artists more agency around how their work is brought into the art world. I do think that there is an emergent interest in the contributions of trans people to art, and that it has to be handled carefully and with the agency of trans people [at the forefront].

SS: [We are] artists who are attempting to do justice with a curatorial practice —to a community, to an idea. Andra and my artistic practices require deep levels of refinement [that] comes through in our curatorial practice in a way that maybe is not the same as someone who is a gallerist who doesn’t have an artistic practice.

ML: Maybe we should talk a little bit more about some of the art that you have shown and are showing.

SS: I’m really excited about Ruby Zarsky, who is bringing close this conversation that is a giant elephant in the room around the sexification of trans women, specifically from, in her words, a pornographic perspective. Instead of these pornographic images of trans women being scrolled through or shared in chat rooms, [in Zarsky’s work] it’s out in the open. And people’s reaction to that, I think, is going to be very interesting to observe.

PHILTH HAUS: LYLEX 1.0 (installation view) (2022). Presented by the Feminist Center for Creative Work (FCCW) at Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and FCCW. Photo: Gilda Davidian.

Tattoo by Stevie Soares entitled Girl Dinner on the arm of Gabi Grossman. Based on Reference #14 from the ink series First Gestures with Oz. Image courtesy of the artist.

AN: If you look at the statistics of top searches that Pornhub has published, a lot of it is some variant of trans subjects. And in these same states that are consuming trans pornography, you see things that actively harm trans people: bills banning or restricting trans healthcare or policing public space, bathroom bills, etc. So all this attraction to trans people is relegated to private, shameful, hushed experiences. Ruby is subverting that, and asking what happens when you put a painting in a room that makes people have to very publicly engage with their attraction to these types of bodies. Ruby is coming from this background of being a performer, as part of a music duo, Sateen, that has garnered a lot of praise and attention in the music world. She understands how she operates, how her body operates in performance. So now she’s trying to explore that with an object-based practice.

We will be starting 2025 with a solo exhibition by Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, or Puppies Puppies, who has recently played with her nude body in public performance in such a way that also really begins to explore what is the lived experience versus the superficial “mascot,” let’s say, of a particular identity. Jade used to dress in mascots or in suits of different characters that would efface her or mask her body in some way. I think people often now, mistakenly, look at her nude performances or her nude sculpture—one of which was just at Art Basel and the Venice Biennale— and say, “Oh, well, she’s taken off the mascot and she’s showing herself now.” But I really think that actually what she’s done is she’s revealed that the trans body itself, because of how it’s depicted in media, has become a mascot. She’s revealing what’s been done to the trans body through the media, through this endless conversation around people’s bodies and genitals. I have a very personal connection with Jade. And I know that the artist [in the exhibition] following Jade, Creighton, Stevie has a personal relationship to as well.

SS: Yes. The Lovers (2021) by Creighton Baxter was the first work that depicted a trans body that I saw after coming out. And it was really impactful to me to see a trans body depicted in a work of art that coincided with my desperate need to express myself in my gender, but also artistically. There was something in her painting that just screamed out to me.

I have followed that scream ever since…I was at the very, very, very, very beginning of a journey [and] I had no idea what it would entail. It turned into starting my own artistic practice, and then this curatorial practice, eventually leading to showing her work next year, which is a dream come true.

Taste & Discernment (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists, AQNB**, and Ceradon.

Premiere Ink (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists and Ceradon. Photo: Bren Perry.

ML: Trans lineages and trans communities are so essential. Like Zackary Drucker—her whole life, really, is about building these lineages. There’s such a strong need among trans folks for awareness of other trans folks, both present and past, because of the really, incredibly impossible circumstances that exist for trans people. Do you think the gallery is participating in that lineage? You’re making these connections that are life-giving, literally, in ways that are material, psychological, spiritual—like fucking everything. It’s all absolutely necessary for trans people’s survival.

AN: Yes, definitely. These openings, our events, closings—they’re excuses for a whole community to come together and feel celebrated and safe, and also see themselves in our artists— see that they could make art or start something like Ceradon. So we hope, through Ceradon, maybe there will be a few more people who survive, have more food on their table, or have more secure living situations.

ML: There is something about transness that is like a thread. When you “pull” it—when you experience the fluidity of gender and the possibilities this opens up—the whole structure based in oppressive gender norms starts to unravel. And so the whole white-supremacist-cis-hetero-patriarchal-capitalist project starts to unravel. Paul Preciado says this so beautifully in Can the Monster Speak? (2021) when he talks about his gender transition as a vehicle to move beyond “the regime of sex, gender, and sexual difference…[as] a performative engine that produces and legitimizes…the hetero-colonial patriarchy.”² There’s something very specific about the trans experience that’s unprecedented in a way, that has this power to dismantle the (failing) oppressive structures that we’re dealing with in this moment.

AN: I like the analogy of pulling at this thread of transness and everything unraveling. I think that’s really apt. I would also say there’s an incompatibility between transness and the system trying to understand and commodify transness.

Because transness inherently says that your identity is something that is malleable and adjustable, and that you are not fundamentally and innately a certain thing. And if you’re a marketer, and you’re looking out at the world and who you want to market to and who you want an algorithm to be designed around [in order to sell a product to that person], it is very hard to do that with a moving target. [It’s] much easier to do that with a person who’s been convinced that they are one thing and one thing only, and only destined to be that one thing.

ML: Yes, like being nonbinary, which is defined in the negative. There’s no way to define it except for what it’s not.

AN: I think that’s why there’s an inability for [these social and economic systems] to entirely reckon with transness, but that’s also what makes for great art. Great art oftentimes is something where you are in its presence, and you’re awestruck or taken aback because it completely makes you feel incoherent when you look at it—you are somehow erased by becoming so absorbed in what you’re perceiving. It’s something that has an impossible beauty. Or, it does something that connects things in ways that you thought were impossible. Or, [it] reveals an underlying truth or a relationship between things you didn’t think was possible, that did not previously compute with your understanding of the world.

This interview was originally published in Carla issue 38.

Andra Nadirshah has exhibited at institutions such as the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and participated in De Ateliers’ residency program as PHILTH HAUS. She currently works as the Sales Director at Morán Morán.

Stevie Soares is an abstract tattoo artist. She currently works as the Facilities Coordinator at BLUM.

Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), A sculpture for Trans Women… (installation view) (2022). Bronze cast on engraved brass base, 74.75 × 23.5 × 23.5 inches. Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and the Venice Biennale. Photo: Matteo de Mayda.

Molly Larkey is an artist, writer, and organizer based in Los Angeles.

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