Invade My World Nick Stillman

Superheroes are inexorable. Immortal. They don’t age, don’t fail, don’t need silicone injections or performance-enhancing drugs or anti-wrinkle cream to maintain ideal bodies, the rippling outer shells that encase their triumphant inner virtue. A superhero is a character, a performer of perfection. The three artists of Invade My Dreams try on fictionalized superhero personas, using their own bodies as well as drawn or painted imagery. Curated by virtuoso performer of character Kalup Linzy, Invade My Dreams cumulatively dishes up instances of psychological fracture when a superhero’s super veneer cracks.

In Derrick Adams’ video Time to Save the World, the artist pulls on too-tight kiddie tighties decorated with requisite superheroes over his adult frame. A newscast is set low in the video’s sound mix, occupying the same psychic space it does for the typical youngster: linguistic static. “An attack of some kind on the Pentagon…was confirmed by the White House!” a talking head drones while Adams yanks up his underoos, which abjectly fail to contain his total package. Time to Save the World is a swan song to a generation of American youths for whom the stars and stripes embodied a superhero’s invincibility, saving the world with unquestionably pure intent.

Shaun Leonardo transforms himself into a raging, monumental superhero during his performances as the supercharged wrestler El C. Wrestling tends to divide neatly between good guys and bad guys, and El C. is undoubtedly a good guy. Whipping crowds into frenzies, stomping around with electric confidence, and beating his rock-hard chest, he channels the energy of legendary WWF brawler The Ultimate Warrior. Leonardo’s pieces for Invade My Dreams depict El C. as incongruously melancholic: slumping in a swivel chair and mourning a failure or something forgotten. A vulnerable idol is akin to a crying parent; once glimpsed in a moment of weakness, their monumentality is shattered, nothing can ever be the same.

A superhero’s most common home is the comic book, and this is the form Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz mimics in wall drawings of her fictionalized character Wepa Woman. In Raimundi-Ortiz’s narrative vignettes, Wepa Woman who, mythology proffers, “Was born and reared in the cinders of the burning Bronx, nursed on the breast of overcrowded public school classrooms”defends the integrity of NYC’s Puerto Rican women against lecherous pendejos, Aging Ghetto Bitches who “swear that chillin with your daughter and granddaughter at da club is fly,” and especially against nemesis Chuleta Bitch, who once groped our Wepa’s prospective man with her greezy paws. Wepa’s struggles are common ones, the same dramas that appear and disappear every day in NYC’s less glamorous neighborhoods. And when Invade My Dreams closes, this episode of Wepa’s travails will disappear,too she’ll have bigger pork chops to fry. Like any superhero appearance, you gotta see it to believe it. You gotta be there.