Blending painting, sculpture, and digital storytelling, Pageant Mom immerses viewers in surreal worlds shaped by trauma, fantasy, and subversive wit. Drawing on the popular life-simulation game The Sims 4 as both medium and muse, Bakala constructs soapy, operatic family narratives centered on trans and gender-nonconforming characters. These digitally staged vignettes are transformed into lush, theatrical paintings that merge glitch aesthetics, horror cinema, and Catholic iconography—recasting a rigidly coded virtual world through the fluid and sensuous process of painting. Several works are housed in baroque, sculptural frames that amplify the tension between trepidation and tenderness, phantasm and fantasy, posturing and play.
At the heart of Pageant Mom is a rigorous inquiry into the aesthetics of control: the simulated domestic sphere, the performative rituals of femininity, and the confining architectures of care. Within this digital ecosystem, Bakala assembles chosen families that resist coherence while embodying resilience. Invention and joy become instruments of liberation; tightly coded virtual systems are unraveled into loose, living assemblages of social freedom. Through her darkly comic and painstakingly constructed visual language, Bakala investigates the layered complexities of gender, identity, and the mediated performance of selfhood.
Evoking the ancient Greek concepts of techne and poiesis, Bakala’s work dissolves the boundary between craft and creation, between simulation and emergence. Techne—the mastery of tools and technique—is reimagined through her manipulation of both digital avatars and painterly surfaces, each family and frame rendered through acts of deliberate, skillful construction. Yet her practice equally gestures toward poiesis: the act of bringing forth, of making visible what is hidden, inarticulate, or unformed. In depicting these uncanny worlds, Bakala does not merely imitate or stylize—she conjures. What arises is more than aesthetic: it is philosophical. A meditation on how we construct ourselves, how we reveal ourselves, and how technology functions simultaneously as instrument of control and mechanism of cultivation. In this way, Pageant Mom envisions digital play as a radical form of queer poiesis—where fantasy is not escape, but revelation.