The Gaze Looks Back

Lauren Fleniken at Zeke’s Projects

In It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, Dallas painter Lauren Fleniken turns the gallery into a charged theater of seeing and being seen. On view at Zeke’s Projects from September 6–October 18, 2025, the exhibition brings together new oil paintings and an installation that pairs hand-sewn undergarments with saturated self-portraiture. The result is a taut, unsettling meditation on feminine sexual identity-its performance, its contradictions, and the uneasy border where desire brushes against violence.

Fleniken’s work is rooted in autobiography without being confessional for its own sake. Raised in rural North Texas, she invokes the Texas countryside as both cradle and cautionary tale, equal parts romantic Western and back-road horror film. That doubleness threads through the show: lace and satin meet oil and glare; softness hangs beside a stare that refuses to yield. The artist’s statement names the core tension plainly: there is no “perfect victim,” and the performances we learn of sweetness, of compliance, of picture-perfect allure, are often rehearsed to please, even as they invite misreading or harm. Fleniken’s canvases hold that contradiction rather than resolve it. Her figures are poised, manicured, almost lacquered in light, yet the gaze they return is unwavering, even defiant.

The installation literalizes this dialectic. Fleniken has sewn a line of delicate undergarments, each measured “to hypothetically fit me perfectly,” and strung them in the space like a procession of intimacies. The garments are tokens of vulnerability, but they are also costumes, evidence of how identity is fitted, tailored, staged. Nearby, painted selves turn the ambient voyeurism of the gallery back onto the viewer. “Look at me, but don’t touch,” the work seems to say, asserting boundaries while acknowledging the fraught economy of attention that images, especially images of women, are made to circulate within.

If the landscapes of Fleniken’s upbringing offer comfort in daylight, their after-dark counterpart carries a different charge. She describes standing on a dim porch with the sense that the woods are watching back. That sensation, of being observed by what you cannot fully see, animates the paintings’ surfaces. Color blooms lushly, then curdles at the edges; light glamorizes even as it exposes. Fleniken is an expert at using beauty as a lure and a trap: We enter through sheen and saturation, only to find a scene where tropes of femininity and the mythology of the South are carefully unpicked.

The title nods toward a classic of country music that inverted a moralistic narrative by giving the woman her say. Fleniken extends that inversion visually. Self-portraiture becomes a site of authorship rather than a rehearsal of expectation; the lingerie becomes armor as much as adornment. The “fine line between our fetishes and feelings,” as she puts it, is traced with care—never sensationalized, never sanitized.

Fleniken’s trajectory has been swift and focused. A 2023 BFA in Painting from TCU, an alumna of Cedars Union Cohort 4, and now a studio artist in the Tin District, she received the 2025 Clare DeGolyer grant from the Dallas Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions at Zona 7, 500X, The Carillon, and the Adolphus Hotel developed the vocabulary on view here: a compositional precision that accommodates unruly subject matter, a willingness to stage vulnerability without ceding control of its terms.

Zeke’s Projects frames the presentation with characteristic clarity: “low stakes but deadly serious,” as the gallery positions its mission. That paradox suits Fleniken’s project. The stakes, after all, are intimate: how a body is seen, how a story is told, how desire can be claimed without being co-opted. The seriousness is aesthetic and ethical. These paintings and garments insist that spectatorship is never neutral, that beauty has consequences, and that the person pictured is the one doing the looking back.

Follow @zekesprojects for updates or contact zekesprojectsmail@gmail.com / (214) 307-2129 for appointments.