Author Description

Raspberry Swirl: Dyke Views on Tori is a collaborative project between writer Ksenia M. Soboleva, and artists Samantha Nye & Catalina Schliebener. It poses Tori Amos as a time-capsule into 1990s teenage culture, queer alienation, and femme aesthetics. Exploring Nye's and Schliebener's mutual teenage obsession with Tori Amos, Soboleva considers its lasting impact on the artists' creative practices, and proposes the allure of the redhaired musician as a larger queer phenomenon.Ksenia M. Soboleva is a Russian-Tatar writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture, with a particular focus on lesbian (in)visibility. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts with a dissertation titled "Fragments: Art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States." In Ksenia's experience, bringing up Tori Amos at a lesbian dinner party is the best possible thing you can do for everyone involved. Catalina Schliebener, is a Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist and educator who works primarily with collage and site/specific installation, their work draws on images, objects, and narratives associated with childhood and explores gender, sexuality, and class. One of their favorite hobbies is collecting lost children's mittens. Their favorite Tori songs are the little silly ones with animals like Frog on My Toe and Mr. Zebra. Samantha Nye is a painter and video installation artist living in Philadelphia. For the first decade of her life she was a relatively unsuccessful child model. Her work reframes seduction through reenactments of 1960s pop culture, highlighting aging bodies, celebrating queer kinship, and facilitating an intergenerational dialogue about sexuality and pleasure. In highschool, all of her babysitting money went to funding Tori Amos concerts, she lost count at 40.