Carrie Riehl shaved off her eyebrows in early June. I know this because I saw it on Instagram, where Riehl maintains — stars in, really — an art-drenched, visually provocative
account.
By the standards of someone who’s always a nipple or a pubic hair away from being thrown off the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, the eyebrow episode seemed demure. She posts often, and her aesthetic is distinctive: lots of breasts, legs, mouths, spit, hair and fashion. Most of all, lots of Carrie Riehl. Instagram has deleted several of her accounts over the past few years — one, somewhat awkwardly, while it was a “Recommended” page. Each time, she has resurfaced within a few days, under a different name. Her followers — on her latest account, h2.0, a couple of thousand and counting — have little trouble finding her again.
I met with Riehl a few days after her eyebrows vanished to discuss
That Used to Be Us, the art show she was curating — her first — at Haw Contemporary. Riehl, who is 23, lives with her girlfriend and frequent collaborator, Emily Kenyon, in an apartment on a friendly block in the gentrifying Historic Northeast. Some of Riehl’s friends — mostly students and recent graduates, like Riehl, of the Kansas City Art Institute — were hanging out on the front stoop, grilling vegetable kebabs, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes.
She welcomed me inside, and I mentioned her eyebrows. “Right,” she said. I asked how long she thought it would take for them to grow back. “I’ll let you know,” she said.
A little while later, a friend of hers arrived and said, “Your eyebrows! They’re gone!”
“No way,” she said, her voice droll to the point of boredom.