Pia Bakala’s Extravagant Ham Dinner invites viewers into a carefully crafted world where digital simulation, pop culture, and traditional painting converge. The text running along the frame’s perimeter sets the scene: “Grouchen and Glitterine visit with the ghost of their grandmother, Glamma, while she prepares an extravagant ham dinner,” immersing us in a playful yet layered narrative.

Bakala’s practice draws from pop cultural phenomena—Real Housewives, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and stan Twitter culture—using The Sims as both a tool and a stage for storytelling. She constructs elaborate tableaus featuring a cast of transgender women, navigating themes of representation, family, and identity. By translating these digitally composed and imagined scenes into paintings, she questions the intersection of play and lived experience, exploring the ways in which digital worlds can shape and reflect reality.

Each work is housed in a highly detailed foamcore frame, intricately designed with laser-cut, hand-drawn text that expands the storytelling beyond the image itself. In Extravagant Ham Dinner, Bakala scrutinizes paths to motherhood for trans women under capitalism while celebrating the intimate, absurd, and deeply personal moments that define chosen family.