Shadow Girls Cult Conjures Self-Exploration with Mixed Media
Liquid + eyes art in UNRAVELING
Briana Jones / Courtesy Shadow Girls Cult
It rained the other day. A rare occurrence in Seattle summer, I sat with my writing group watching the water cascade down the window, hearing the thunder, and drinking tea, my heart longing for fall. A spooky individual since birth, I’ve often felt like I am in hibernation for most of the year; but with the first mist of autumn in the air, I come alive again, assuming my truest form in the long shadows of shorter days, the scents of harvest and decaying plants, the rain and the mist and the crackling leaves under my feet.
All of this is to say that it is a joy to see macabre art flourishing at all times of the year, and Shadow Girls Cult are keeping that energy alive and well. The Queer shadow puppetry and performance art duo produce enigmatic, dark fantasy worlds through the art of projection. Their latest show, UNRAVELING, ran July 16-18 at Theatre Off Jackson. It presented seven vignettes exploring, per the director’s note, “themes of isolation, longing, and fractured identity through a surreal lens.”
Audiences at UNRAVELING could view the screen in the center of the room from three angles around a circle. The Shadow Girls Cult, or Cass Bray and Zane Exactly, stood at the head of the circle facing the screen and surrounded by their materials: overhead projectors, bowls of water, dye, piles of cutouts and slides, wearable masks, feathers, and their own bodies.
The seven vignettes merged genres as seamlessly as they did artistic media, ranging from noir to sci-fi to dark fantasy and pure horror. In “Giant Woman,” red and black dyes were poured into a pool of water over the projector. The colors swirled in the bowl, overlaid with two pairs of slowly closing eyes. The use of texture and motion in these pieces created dizzying experiences, which felt right on par with the themes of disorientation, dysphoria, and dysmorphia explored in “Unraveling,” the titular vignette.
A big part of the multimedia experience was due to the intricate sound design of these pieces, which featured live foley and musical accompaniment by Leanna Keith. Each of the vignettes was scored, and a few of them also incorporated voiceovers, while “Unusual Suspect” featured humorous text exchanges on the screen.
Cass Bray and Zane Exactly using overhead projectors
Briana Jones / Courtesy Shadow Girls Cult
“They’re Only Dreams” blended the specific loneliness of urban spaces with gothic haunted house themes. This one felt like the kind of nightmare that lingers with you throughout the day. Among the highlights were psychedelic shots of keyholes overlaid with windows and doors leading to nothing, and a dreamscape of a city under water, fish swimming through crumbling ruins.
The vignette “Bird Watching,” based on the poem of the same name by Franny Choi, told a surreal tale of a woman who went into the woods and died looking up at the sky, perhaps devoured by birds and perhaps also a fallen bird herself. When she stood back up and walked, Cass Bray played her silhouette, stumbling forward, hunched, with broken wings and an intricately cracked face like porcelain. The words “Everyone loves a dead girl,” and “Everyone loves a broken glass girl” from this visual poem haunt me still.
UNRAVELING explored different sides of the feminine grotesque. Historically in horror, women and femme bodies are frequently violated and perceived as fragile and breakable. In these stories, the characters were not just hunted but also hunters, not just broken glass girls but also huge, monstrous, and formidable beings. “Unraveling” included lines from the narrator’s perspective about being insatiably hungry, ravenous, and wanting to consume.
Shadow puppetry is an ideal medium for exploring the layered experience of selfhood. To understand ourselves, sometimes we must experience ourselves broken down into a series of parts, then built back again, perhaps differently, but no less beautifully. I love that no two performances of these shadow and light shows were exactly the same. With UNRAVELING, Shadow Girls Cult did what horror does best—they conveyed meaning through striking metaphors and images that were felt viscerally. May macabre art always thrive and explore the shadows within and around us.
Next up in the Shadow Girls Cult cabinet of curiosities, the duo will be lending their shadow design to Blood/Sucker with Washington Ensemble Theatre, which runs Aug. 28 - Sept. 21. They will then be on the team behind Seayoung Kim’s JAR OF FAT at Theatre Battery, opening September 5, 2026.
