September 10 — October 17, 2026
THE WORKED SHOOT
Rosalyn Bodycomb
Conduit Gallery is honored to present THE WORKED SHOOT, an exhibition of new, small scale oil on panel paintings by California-based artist Rosalyn Bodycomb.
THE WORKED SHOOT challenges the viewer to confront the manufactured nature of authority. Bodycomb treats the intersection of professional wrestling, politics, and populism as more than fringe entertainment, positioning it instead as a central framework for understanding modern civic theater. In pro wrestling, The Work is the scripted part of the spectacle, and The Shoot is the unscripted part. At its core, wrestling offers a raw, theatrical template for how modern political movements build identity, manufacture conflict, and mobilize people against a perceived elite.
A shared thread runs through wrestling, politics, and populism, all three rely on a bond between a leader, or performer, and an audience that bypasses traditional logic in favor of impassioned pageantry. Wrestling's most significant contribution to this framework is the concept of Kayfabe, the portrayal of staged events as real. In traditional kayfabe, wrestlers stayed in character at all times to protect the illusion of the sport. In what Bodycomb calls Neo Kayfabe, everyone knows the fight is scripted, but chooses to believe in the emotional stakes anyway. Modern populism often operates on this same level. Followers recognize when a leader is exaggerating, yet they actively maintain kayfabe, embracing the performance because it validates their frustrations and names their perceived enemies. The wrestler, the babyface, the heel, the acrobats, the marching bands, the cheerleaders, all commit themselves to maintaining the work of power.
To ground this conceptually, Bodycomb maps Aristotle's cycle of government, anacyclosis, onto the modern squared circle. Aristotle argued that states rotate inevitably from virtuous monarchy to corrupt tyranny. Visually, Bodycomb illustrates this structural decay as a revolving wrestling ring, where political heels and faces perform their predetermined roles within an ancient script of societal collapse.
The paintings bridge the aesthetic gap between realism and the visceral, muscular immediacy of Abstract Expressionism. By rendering modern demagogues through the lens of classical oratory and aggressive, physical mark-making, these paintings force a confrontation with the permanence of the historical record and the volatility of live performance.
Bodycomb was born in Hawaii, and spent her childhood in Southern California before eventually moving to Texas, where she earned an MFA in painting at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Alternative Museum in New York, the Arlington Museum of Art, The Grace Museum, and the L9 Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award (2005), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2007), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2009). She lives and works outside of Yosemite Valley, California.