I want to beach the way Frostina beaches. Do you see him up there, the crocheted wool figure, legs propped open to expose a genderqueer, psychedelic rainbow? You can see the scars from a double mastectomy, perhaps from a gender confirmation surgery, glorious badges of nonconformity. The only item of clothing on his stitched body is a pink cape, identifying Frostina as not just not ordinary but extraordinary, a super queer superhero who feels right at home spreading wide for the world to see.

Frostina is one of artist Caroline Wells Chandler 's "Beach Bois," a crew of genderqueer bathers whose awkward, cheesy smiles and rainbow physiques celebrate radical queerness, recently on view at Lord Ludd in Philadelphia.

The series takes inspiration from Paul Czanne's "The Large Bathers ," an early 20th century painting of nude women huddled around a natural bath. The Post-Impressionist figures sit and sprawl together on the shore, their unclothed bodies in various positions of gentle, passive repose. The naked ritual is sensual but not sexualized, as if the work's erotic charge emanated from the viscous layers of paint more than what they depict. The nude forms allude ever so slightly to an undoing of gender, their pale, fleshy bodies possessing both strength and grace in a way that contests normative fantasy and desire.

If Czanne's 30-year effort to paint bathers in various iterations was an early call to undo binary distinctions between men and women, through the unifying beauty of flesh-colored paint, Chandler takes this holy aspiration to its most radical endpoint. In his crocheted cast of characters, rainbows spew from butt cracks, and genitals are awesomely ambiguous. While Czanne worked in paint, a medium closely aligned with brooding male genius and docile female muses, Chandler opts for the typically feminine domestic craft of crochet, undoing the veil of masculine seriousness that pervades Czanne's original.