In twenty-five years she’ll be silver grows out of a childhood memory of a house fire that Hill lived through at age twelve. During the fire, her stepmother rescued four fur coats—gifts from a toxic ex-husband—from their burning home. Damaged and still carrying the smell of smoke and ash, the coats remain stored in the family’s closet to this day, wrapped in silk garment bags and off-limits to anyone but her. 

Hill builds the exhibition around this gesture and the material legacy of objects women inherit or receive, especially within romantic relationships. She looks closely at the act of gift-giving—its emotional charge, its economic weight, its complicated, sometimes transactional,  attachments. Her work traces how, historically, such gifts could become a form of alternative economy and survival for women at times when they were denied access to their own financial systems, including something as basic as a personal bank account.

୨ৎ 

Dear C, 

Remember when we used to wear those rings that would turn our fingers blue? We would throw pennies into the fountain at the mall. I am eight and twisting my ankles as I try on my mother’s high-heeled shoes. In my room, I keep a bag full of half-used lipstick and old matchboxes I steal from the top drawer of her dresser. We play hide-and-seek between clothing racks at Sears, buying underwear with teddy bears and hearts on them before growing up to lust after silk. 

A mother writes to FQMom: “Help! My daughter is developing an expensive taste! I fear that her taste will make it difficult for her to achieve financial freedom.”

When I am eight, you are twelve, and your house catches fire. A faulty copper wire buried in the walls. You tell me your stepmother salvaged four fur coats before anything else. You lost half a house, half a body. You struggle to remember whether the basement had wood panelling or how many children there were to a bedroom. The coats still hang in garment bags in the back of her closet, smelling of smoke and chemicals. 

I think about the heart-shaped Cadbury boxes that were designed to outlive the chocolates they once held, and how we learn to fill them with love letters before we know how to spell.

I am sixteen when my mother’s fiancé gifts me a dog for my birthday. She lifts her out of a pen in a strip-mall pet store and we call her “Coco Chanel.” Years later, in a desperate move to leave him, we use the dog as a bargaining chip. I sometimes look for updates of her on his Facebook profile, his relationship status still “single.” My mother saves up to buy herself a pink-lined Louis Vuitton bag. She keeps it wrapped in a dust bag under her bed until she turns sixty.

I read the closing line of Anne Boyer’s imagined book A Woman Shopping: “If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her.”

You show me wedding cake pictures from your mother’s collection. Miniature plastic pergolas, sugar swans, and frosted roses; love’s edible fruition. I think about the temporary architecture of marriage. Flowers wilting in their vases the next day, the beautiful smell of that mess. Hand-me-down wedding dresses sold at garage sales for far less than they’re worth.

In his “Remembrance” fragment from A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes that the imperfect is the tense of fascination—the grammar of things that remain present without ever fully returning.

I am twenty-eight and living near the bridal district. It’s nighttime when I walk on Saint-Hubert Street. I think about how long the shops are, how far they extend into the back, and how many dresses they hold. I imagine entire inventories filled with futures waiting to be purchased. Aspiration stitched into satin bolts and sequin bodices.

In a scene from Wanda, the protagonist is stranded without a wallet in a shopping mall. She returns to the same criminal who stole it from her and they marry in clothes drawn from a wardrobe in the back of their car. He says to her: “If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You may as well be dead.” 

You show me an image of a mannequin standing before a mirror from an eBay ad selling a fur coat. I’d say she’s looking at her reflection but her eyes are closed. Manicured nails and pointed shoes built into her jaundiced body like a second skin. The glossy nap of the mink catches the harsh fluorescent department store lighting. I wonder what secrets might be stitched into its seams. 

I read poems by men that claim they want to “free” mannequins from shop windows. Later, I learned that when some are retired, they become targeting practice for the military.

I am eight again hiding for hours in the back of my grandmother’s coat closet. My feet disappear into her boots while my face presses into wool and cedar. I imagine the coats closing around me until I can no longer tell where my body ends and theirs begin.

—Ally