Bedtime Stories for Bad Boys and Girls at Dashwood Projects unfolds as a raw and unfiltered journey through memory, friendship, and excess. Presented from March 25 to April 4, 2026, the exhibition brings together photographs by
Larry Clark and drawings by James Gilroy, forming a layered narrative that drifts between image and recollection. Rooted in decades of shared experience, the project captures the restless energy of lives shaped by risk, experimentation, and a refusal of restraint.
Clark’s photographs carry the immediacy and confrontational honesty that define his practice. Known for chronicling youth culture and its entanglements with desire, addiction, and rebellion, his images here feel less like documentation and more like fragments pulled from a lived intensity. Paired with Gilroy’s drawings—loose, expressive, and often darkly humorous—the exhibition creates a visual rhythm that echoes the unpredictability of the stories themselves. Together, they construct a space where memory does not settle but continues to shift and distort.
At the core of the project lies a series of spoken stories, recalled in a single sitting and preserved in their original, unpolished form. These narratives move across decades, from the postwar years into the turbulent atmosphere of 1970s downtown New York. Rather than smoothing over time, the exhibition embraces its inconsistencies, allowing contradictions and exaggerations to coexist. The result feels closer to oral history than autobiography, where truth emerges through repetition, embellishment, and the act of telling itself.
There is a sense of humor running through
Bedtime Stories for Bad Boys and Girls, though it remains inseparable from moments of danger and vulnerability. The work lingers in the space between recklessness and reflection, where youthful bravado meets the weight of experience. In revisiting these stories, Clark and Gilroy do not attempt to resolve the past; instead, they animate it, allowing its chaos, intimacy, and absurdity to remain vividly present.
Image:
© Larry Clark, Image courtesy of Luhring Augustine