Coney Island

MIMI lights a cigarette on the stove. Sex kitten half-naked. 22. Alcoholic. Contemporary conwoman. Maintains her lazy lifestyle through freeloading. Always looking for a way in and a way out.

-Character Description by Lauren Cook

Marking the conclusion of Michelle Uckotter's BOFFO Residency, she will present Coney Island, an exhibition of new paintings, video, and installation at the historic Carrington House in the Fire Island Pines. Coney Island will be on view Saturday, May 30th & Sunday, May 31st from 12 - 6pm. Please join BOFFO and the artist for a reception on Saturday May 30th from 6 - 8pm. To visit the exhibition enter the Carrington House from the gate located at the corner of Ocean Walk and Sandy Walk. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Please RSVP.

Michelle Uckotter is an artist working within painting, sculpture, and video. Her work explores the boundaries of the femininity as sites of both desire and destruction. In her world, femininity is unstable, slipping between performance and erasure, violence and becoming. Like the experience of womanhood itself, her scenes resist resolution, caught in the tension between transformation and the structures that seek to contain it. The structure is on the verge of collapse.

Artist Biography

Michelle Uckotter (b. 1992, Cincinnati, OH) lives and works in New York. her paintings, which feature visceral and expressive use of oil pastels, render doll-like women in the interstitial spaces of a home: hallways, attics, and basements. Uckotter’s figures play with the genre tropes of Hollywood horror films, and heighten the stakes inherent to those suspenseful scenes. With a myriad of references from the Nabis, Munch, and Hans Bellmer, Michelle contorts a knowledge of painterly modernism with contemporary femininity on the verge of collapse.

She received a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Moviestar, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2025); Moviestar, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2025); Big Time Shopping is Here, Bernheim Gallery, Zurich, CH (2024); Trap Paintings Vol. 3, King’s Leap, New York (2023); Independent Art Fair, with King’s Leap, New York (2023); Dust Box, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2022); Stairwells Ephemera Etcetera, T293, Rome, IT (2021); Trap Paintings Vol. 2, King’s Leap, New York (2021); Murder Time, Springsteen Gallery, New York (2021); Trap Paintings, A.D. Gallery, New York (2020); Cornswoggle, with Ryan Nault, Mole End, Queens (2019); and Chin Up Bar, with Joe. W. Speier, curated by Macgregor Harp, Baltimore (2018).