Alex McQuilkin: Obviously, Doctor

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Obviously, Doctor, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Alex McQuilkin. Known for her rigorously conceptual yet deeply personal approach, McQuilkin’s new paintings excavate the interwoven threads of gendered performance, domestic aesthetics, and media archetypes. Through a deft juxtaposition of found imagery and wallpaper motifs, she stages an inquiry into the construction and instability of feminine identity in contemporary culture.

Rendered in labor-intensive, muted monochrome palettes, McQuilkin’s paintings isolate and recontextualize visual tropes drawn from film stills, advertisements, Pinterest boards, and the artist’s own girlhood bedrooms. From the pastel fragility of floral wallpaper to the iconic image of Lolita’s heart-shaped sunglasses, these works unmask the unseen architecture of influence embedded within our visual environments. What appears innocent—chintz prints, hair bows, ballerina slippers—becomes charged with unease, memory, and critique.

Drawing inspiration from theorists such as Legacy Russell, McQuilkin aligns her practice with a glitch feminist ethos: a refusal to perform, a breakdown of media as resistance. Her paintings intentionally reveal their own construction—unfinished trompe-l’oeil borders, interrupted labor, digital compression marks—suggesting not only the artifice of the image, but the artifice of the roles the images project and perpetuate. As in Not Winning an Unwinnable Game is Not the Same as Failing, the fragility of analog and digital simulations alike underscores the impossibility of living up to their coded ideals. Each work in the exhibition functions as a double exposure: a nostalgic echo of aspirational femininity and a critical dismantling of its machinery. In #hysterical, a viral image of performance artist Marthe Fortun—captured mid-lecture with milk leaking through her shirt—becomes a quietly radical act of embodied refusal, tenderness, and truth.

McQuilkin’s practice is not about nostalgia, but about recognition: of the subtle indoctrinations we live with, and of the ways we might undo them. By suturing the decorative with the digital, and labor with critique, the exhibition opens a space to reconsider how identity is curated, performed, and sometimes—when we’re lucky—reclaimed.