Dakota Higgins’ debut solo exhibition, Apostrophe, positions the viewer within a collapsed theater of masculine power, familial nostalgia, and political spectacle. Named after the punctuation mark that denotes possession, absence, and address, Apostrophe interrogates the rhetorical and visual mechanics of authority and representation.

At the center of the exhibition are “Dentless Portraits,” a suite of presidential likenesses rendered in meticulous fidelity to their official referents — every gesture, backdrop, and artist’s signature preserved. And yet, each portrait is empty. The presidents are gone, but their seats remain, sometimes precariously upright, sometimes off to the corner, but always rendered in glitter, a material so overdetermined in its symbolism that it becomes the ideal contranym, suggesting at once opulence and detritus, celebration and degradation, sparkle and shame.

In these portraits, masculinity sits in drag. Glitter here doesn’t feminize; it exposes. It clings to structures of entitlement with a petulant joy, simultaneously monumentalizing and undermining. There is a vacancy at the heart of these images — chairs meant for presiding figures become placeholders for a disappearing act, where power is both acutely present and glaringly absent.

The word “president” — from the Latin praesidere, “to sit before” — has echoes within the familial: the patriarch at the head of the table, of the country, of the portrait. Dakota’s work collapses domestic and political staging. The family living room and the Oval Office share a flattened visual language — both are curated sets, both are backdrops for performances of control and cohesion. In his installation “Happy Place,” Dakota leans into this convergence, drawing from the iconography of the American holiday season — that idealized moment when families gather around craft tables and fireplaces, producing and consuming together. The parable of warmth becomes a mirror for the myth of leadership.

In Dakota’s work, gestures of the arts and crafts function not just as material choices, but as biographical markers. They trace back to the artist’s earliest encounters with making: surrounded by ritual and the shared labor of ornamentation. The viewer is invited to consider the act of making as one entwined with care and with compliance. In this context, the handmade ornament and the symbols of state share a genealogy. Both are made to signify belonging, to instil belief, and to perform stability, even as they conceal the fragility underneath.

Scattered within the exhibition, American coinage appears — some framed luxuriously in walnut and velvet, but most tucked discreetly into corners, under frames, or along moldings; hidden like Easter eggs. These minor apparitions hint at the people rendered invisible by the myth of the singular great man. These quiet presences mark a refusal — a refusal to perform, to participate, to become what the portrait demands.

Dakota has never met his father. In many ways, this lifelong absence animates his project. The portraits in this show are portraits of men who “preside” over everything and nothing — symbols of fatherhood as both myth and machinery. Apostrophe captures the patriarchal structure in its purest theatrical form: reverent, absurd, and hollow.

— Raghvi Bhatia