NO SLEEP/NO PICNIC

A two-person show by Halo Starling and Libby Paloma

July 2–12, 2026

Human Resources Gallery

410 Cottage Home St
Los Angeles, CA

NO SLEEP/NO PICNIC brings together work by queercrip artists Halo Starling and Libby Paloma in a two-person exhibition at Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles. The show pairs Starling’s textile installation NO SLEEP (2026) with Paloma’s soft-sculptural installation NO PICNIC (2023), two works that refuse the idea that surviving difficulty should be invisible, dignified, or done alone.

Starling’s NO SLEEP (2026) draws on their experience of Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), chronic nightmares, and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). Starling’s ensuing years-long sleep debt required five months of convalescence in their bed. The work takes the form of a sleep temple: the bedsheets from Starling’s recovery hang from CPAP machine tubing like temple walls, adorned with pillow-shaped votives. The votives — silkscreened onto hand-woven linen, the material of ancient Greek bedding — reference the stone offerings of affected body parts that Ancient Greek supplicants would bring to these temples. Viewers encounter vertical bed sheets that cannot be slept on, mirroring the struggles of living with a sleep disorder. Private convalescence becomes sacred architecture; befriending sleep becomes a ritual.

Paloma’s NO PICNIC (2023) is an 18-foot-long soft-sculptural installation that transforms idiomatic expressions about ability into an absurd, meticulous picnic scene. Living with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease (UCTD), Paloma draws on her background in Speech-Language Pathology and craft practices learned from her Chicana ancestors to materialize phrases like “bigger fish to fry,” “the whole enchilada,” “in a pickle,” and “when life gives you lemons” as soft sculptures. The installation enacts what Paloma calls “world softening”: the practice of imagining a softer world, while also considering who has the privilege to luxuriate in public spaces.

Taken together, the NO SLEEP/NO PICNIC diptych is a meditation on the near-constant state of queercrip survival, encountering and resisting barriers to access, and the resulting body trauma, all day and all night. NO SLEEP was created as a response to NO PICNIC, meditating on the embrace and challenges of a “world-softening” bedtime for traumatized crips. NO PICNIC is about seeking softness in the daytime in public; NO SLEEP is about struggling with softness in the nighttime in private. Together the works ask what it costs to keep going, and what forms of care make it possible.

For more info, please visit HR's website.

Install photography by Sight Photography Studio.