Due to its size and scale, Proxy Gallery has the capacity to both monumentalize and miniaturize its exhibits. Armor, the installation by Xochi Maberry-Gaulke, emerging in her first post-MFA solo exhibition, uses the gallery/container to explore the self through the body, and more specifically, the relationship of her own body to another/her mother.

The three “walls” of the gallery are covered in kaleidoscopic tiled photographs of skin and pubic hair pulled by fingers to reveal, it turns out, her mother’s now-healed Cesarean birth scar out of which was born Xochi Maberry-Gaulke. In the center of the gallery stands a small/large “pedestal” also covered in photos of pubic hair bearing a small tuft of actual yellow hair. This hair is the only non-photographic, non-metonymic, almost forensic evidence of the body of the artist herself.

Maberry-Gaulke is interested in emotional lineage and literal lineage; in the intergenerational, especially matrilineal, aspects of the formation of the self. She considers the body to be a grounding strategy; here, however, the “body” as subject matter serves as a shortcut: its organic materiality is necessarily presented in discursiveform: photographically, metonymically, sculpturally, and linguistically. These codes engage in a constant dialogue without a final punchline.​