Nao Bustamante
at Track 16

Nao Bustamante, BLOOM (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Track 16.

As a field historically predicated on the exploitation of women’s bodies, American gynecology has long had a synergistic relationship between medicine, science, sexual violence, and slavery. The creation of the vaginal and anal speculum, in particular, dates back as early as ancient Greece and Rome through its modern redesign by James Marion Sims—an amateur doctor and entrepreneur who experimented on enslaved and immigrant women in the mid-1800s.¹ Taking a sardonic approach to such histories, Nao Bustamante’s multimedia project BLOOM offers a thoughtful critique via a playful and queer reimaging of the modern vaginal and anal speculum. The project’s fourth iteration at Track 16 includes videos, theater curtains, oil paintings, redesigned speculums, collaboratively made clay objects, and an antique gynecological table that contend with the persistence of racist gynecological practices and devices, offering an alternative predicated on care and bodily support.

Track 16’s gallery is designed to resemble a vulvic interior replete with fleshy pink and mauve wall paint. BLOOM opens with Curtain (2021), a set of large, draping red velvet theater curtains adorned with braided gold fringe. The curtain’s vulvic appearance serves as a coy allusion to the spectacle of sexual healthcare as a kind of theatrical staging. Projected nearby, Portal (2021) features a gaping, leaking drainpipe reminiscent of anal leakage (a nod to ASCO’s Asshole Mural, 1974). Both Curtain and Portal visualize the exhibition’s broader emphasis on how certain bodies have been rendered into nothing more than flesh.² Two oil paintings recollective of meat, Curtain #1 and Curtain #2 (both 2024), further analogize the fabric with the bloody, indiscriminate legacies of bodies violated in service of the Western patriarchal medical gaze. 

Bustamante’s series of redesigned speculums and flowering plants, BLOOM (series) (2021), counters such practices. The simple concept drawings include annotations that clarify how redesigns predicated on adequate lubrication and varying anatomical needs might facilitate a less intrusive experience and press back against the rote assumption that gynecology exams are limited to women’s sexual health care. For example, mock-ups of the “Bustamante Bloom Speculum” are variously depicted as a dripping, open-mouthed container and smooth apparatus with a delicate dial opening, compostable cloth, and nonslip handle. In her cacti print, a gender-neutral patient is shown reclining comfortably while the Bustamante speculum is inserted through a pelvic privacy sheet retrofitted with a small opening. By imagining speculum and pelvic exam practices based on personal comfort and health, BLOOM reorients the traumatic and scopic histories of the pelvic exam into a person-first model. 

Nao Bustamante: BLOOM runs from September 28–December 7, 2024, at Track 16 (1206 Maple Ave., Ste. 100 & 1005, Los Angeles, CA 90015).

April Baca (xe/xem) is a Los Angeles-based writer, educator, and occasional curator. Xer research focuses on contemporary visual media and performance, with an emphasis on alternative ontologies and digital reconstructions. Xe has contributed to various anthologies, catalogs, and publications, including, but not limited to, Artforum, Art Journal, and X-TRA.

More by April Baca