Asking For
a Friend
Heidi Hankaniemi, Silvana Soriano, Lydia Viscardi, and Joan Wheeler
March 7–April 5, 2025
The CAMP Gallery
I’d be lying if I said I loved the parts of post-modern feminism that hing upon my isolation from community. As the last vestiges of the Modern World™ fall apart, I think about bell hooks’ dedication to love and community as symbiotic processes. This exhibition came at a time where my own journey to healing has experienced stagnation, if I can be super honest.
I conducted virtual studio visits with each of the participating artists, and while I adored everything I saw (it was difficult to decide on the artwork), it was the human conversations that inspired this exhibition’s concept. Without Heidi’s conceptualism, SIlvana’s introspection, and Lydia and Joan’s dedication to invisible labor, I wouldn’t have arrived at the central thesis presented below.
Asking For a Friend unites four artists fifty and older: Lydia Viscardi, Silvana Soriano, Heidi Hankaniemi, and Joan Wheeler. The exhibition borrows from the familiar mechanism of an advice column—with a twist—using distinct bodies of work to explore questions of love, pride, fear, and autonomy as a form of allyship and emotional community-building.
The tradition of an advice column evokes a particular type of desperation, namely to resolve a problem with the guidance of an objective, verified advice-giver. The questions posed in these columns range from the practical to the existential— laundering, gardening, housekeeping, conflict, loneliness, and self-esteem. Is it possible to get blood out of white fabric? How can I improve my relationship with my mother? What should I say to my awful neighbor the next time she says my shoes are ugly? How do I combat the persistent, existential dread coursing through my veins? (Silvana Soriano, Maria, 2025.)
Asking For a Friend celebrates the ways in which women take care of one another, explicitly pushing past the woes of a blossoming generation to be inclusive of trans-generational perspectives and experiences. The exhibition functions as a space wherein one can navigate personal and communal hardships: how to grieve; celebrate small victories; find courage; get rich; start over; accept reality (Heidi Hankaniemi, Bonnet, 2016); dream.
At the same time, however, this exhibition is a lament for the cultural shift away—not from advice columns in essence, but from communal wisdom toward hyper-independence, isolating entire networks of women from community-oriented practices. Columns of the past featured tips to better one’s housekeeping (Joan Wheeler, Laundry Day Chore Coat, 2025), sex life, or beauty, and were, admittedly, sometimes perpetuating harmful, gendered cultural attitudes. Nonetheless, the idea of an advice column speaks to an intellectual and spiritual bond between women, especially between women in different stages of life; these relationships do exist for most women, and are often confined to the familial sphere.
Through garments, conceptual textile sculpture, object assemblages, and collaging, this exhibition takes root in a need for considerate and compassionate pathways toward learning (Lydia Viscardi, Museum of Seasons, 2022). Asking For a Friend invites visitors to step away from doomscrolling, internet rabbit holes, and internal monologues of quiet panic to find sanctuary in shared experience—within communities, within art spaces, and within one another.
Bring a question. Offer it up to the artists, to the curator. We’ll hold it together.
A note from the curator: The CAMP Gallery’s programming for this exhibition will feature submitted queries. Questions you have for each artist will be shared with them; you can keep it anonymous, or share your name.