“I have always been a liberated woman” —Florence Smith1

Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments at the Philadelphia Museum of Art opens with text citing Homer’s Iliad and a dedication to craftsmanship and physique inspired by the character, Epeios. Homer’s other work, The Odyssey, would’ve been appropriate if we were going to curate an exhibit based on professional boxing wives’ invisible labor.

Penelope waits twenty years for Odysseus to return to Ithaca from the Trojan War. On his way back, Odysseus has many side quests while his wife, Penelope, fervently bats away suitors. And of course, there’s the romantic detail that their bed cannot be moved because it is the trunk of an olive tree, which is supposed to signify the loyal, stable home Penelope consistently provides. As spectators of the epic adventure and love story, we should never doubt that Odysseus will return to her.

Unlike Penelope, the professional boxing wives of fifty years ago were invited to sit ringside during their husbands' epic, athletic conquests. Rising Up prominently features the working-class Philadelphia culture and Black boxers of American history that inspired Sylvester Stallone’s story development throughout the Rocky franchise—Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Tom Molineaux, Jack Johnson, and Philadelphia’s own Joe Frazier. A room of the exhibit is dedicated to Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier’s 1971 fight. Beyond the edges of the photographs, paintings, magazine covers, and advertisement posters—in the stands—you will not find the boxers’ wives.

The last match Florence Smith, Joe Frazier’s wife (now ex-wife), attended was in 1966.2 Florence said Joe’s fights “... make me too nervous, I went to a couple of his first ones, but they made me too upset.”3

Florence and Joe Frazier met as children in South Carolina. Beaufort and St. Helena Island, South Carolina—where Joe and Florence hail from—is home to the Gullah/Geechee people. The Gullah/Geechee Nation was brought specifically from West Africa for their agricultural knowledge, were isolated on coastal plains retaining their African customs, and intermarried with local indigenous tribes.

Rising Up includes Cherokee and Mississippi Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson’s three repurposed boxing bags titled You Can Feel It All Over, POWER POWER POWER, and People Like Us. Gibson’s work celebrates the indigenous ties to land and how the Black boxers in the exhibit come from families of southern sharecroppers, who were assigned to tend the land for nourishment and capital gains for their oppressors. Additionally, in an interview with Whitewall, Gibson made his ties to Black culture explicit: “Growing up brown in America, people lumped my Native identity with Black identity, but those histories are very different. That said, I learned so much from Black culture—music, people like Nina Simone, James Baldwin. They were lifelines.”

Throughout Joe’s career, Florence desired a quiet life with Joe and their children, but their relationship was hardly quiet, not even as teenagers. The day she was supposed to start college, September 12, 1960, she gave birth to their first child, Marvis.4 By 1962, with a second child in tow, she joined Joe in Philadelphia. What makes this situation scandalous under the surface is that Joe also had two other children with Rosetta Green.5 By the time Joe Frazier filed for divorce in 1985, he had a total of 11 children, six outside of their marriage.6

If an exhibit were designed around Florence’s role as a wife and mother, it would have also included Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting, Untitled (Cave Painting). Basquiat uses a Warhol-inspired printmaking collage technique in which repeated muscular, red figures with black legs and a crown have their dicks hanging out. As if ultimate male strength can only be measured by the visibility of how much an athlete uses his nether regions, spreads his seed, and “thinks up the names.”7

During Joe Frazier’s career, Florence was a married, single mother. “She is alone too often. He is away too often, too long.”8 In the archives, we can find Florence filling her time bowling, volunteering at school, attending Bible class, and “try[ing] to keep herself busy.”9 Her devotion to remaining a dutiful mother and chaste wife in her husband's absence made her a reluctant advocate for women’s liberation. In 1972, when asked what she thought about women’s liberation, Florence told The Philadelphia Tribune, “I don’t want to discuss that.” By 1974, before Ali and Frazier’s second fight, Florence sang a different tune. Gloria Hochman writes about Florence’s strength in raising five children and maintaining a household. Florence says, “I am a liberated woman…I have to be liberated because Joe’s away so much. If I don’t take care of things, who will?”10

1974 is the same year the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed, allowing women to obtain credit cards and bank accounts independently. This is also the year that Florence hosted the North Central Women’s Political Caucus Political Poolside Party at her residence in Lafayette Hills, Whitemarsh Township, Pennsylvania.11 The caucus was founded by Ruth Harper (1927-2006), a charm school founder and Democratic civic leader elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1976, and would go on to serve seven terms.12 Through this event, Florence provided a space for Democratic Black women in Pennsylvania to convene.

There are two Black women visual artists featured in Rising Up: Howardena Pindell and Kara Walker. Pindell’s Video Drawings, Boxing: 1976, reiterates the exhaustion of boxing: every line in the image is numbered, as if she were diagramming, in fascination, how many movements occurred in a match in a short period of time. She was born in Philadelphia in 1943. “The metaphorical process of destruction and reconstruction at work in her paintings” reflects professional athletic bodies constantly exercising brute force and ripping and repairing muscles so they can grow for optimal performance.

Kara Walker’s work in the exhibition Signal Station, Summit of Signal Heights, is part of her lithograph series Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). The techniques she utilizes are derived from Black southern storytelling and Civil War narratives. The title of Walker’s work originates from a 1862 wood carving by Alfred Rudolph Waud, in which she places her silhouettes in conversation with the terrain. Walker’s inclusion in the exhibit highlights the southern roots of the boxers, such as Muhammad Ali from Kentucky, Tom Molineaux from Virginia, Joe Frazier from South Carolina, Jack Johnson from Texas, and Joe Louis from Alabama.

The inclusion of these Black women artists illustrates the racial and physical trauma Black boxers bring to athletic and domestic spaces. These works also amplify the exhaustion of the wives outside of the ring as they get the short end of the stick when it comes to their husbands’ patience and bandwidth. In 1971, Florence said about Joe, “He’s so easy-going…He’s kind-hearted to everybody. I seem to be the only one he gives a hard time.”13 This sentiment echoes through Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, also featured in the exhibit. The opening lines of the poem read:

“The one hand is your Language.

The other hand is your Art.”

Brooks wrote this poem in response to the 1971 Frazier and Ali fight. She pleads to Frazier and Ali to remember that, despite the fight, Black people only have each other, and they need to leave the hostility in the ring to embrace “black love.” In relation to Florence and Joe’s marriage, one hand is art (boxing) and the other hand is what he says to her. At the most, Florence is only getting fifty percent of Joe.

In 1979, Florence was awarded the Legion of Honor by the Chapel of Four Chaplains for her “civic and community work and for contributions to her family.”14 According to Michelle Nolfi, Chapel Director, “The Legion of Honor Program was established by President Harry Truman and the founding Trustees of The Chapel of Four Chaplains to publicly recognize persons whose lives model the kind of selfless service to community, nation and humanity without regard to race, religion or creed, as dramatically exemplified by the Four Chaplains.” This award is given out to recipients based on their service to their local community.

To make a monument to a woman like Florence Smith, we must curatorially and artistically consider what it’s like to be defined by invisible labor. Outside of fulfilling their duties of being cheerleaders and mothers of their family’s legacy, sports wives must create their own identity, whether they want to stay in the public eye or not. In Rocky IV and Rocky V, Adrian’s supportive wife role is minimized to even fewer lines compared to the previous films.

In the sixth film, Rocky Balboa, Adrian is dead. Like Penelope and Florence, Adrian provided emotional support and gave Rocky one son, an heir. Her work is done. Adrian’s duty was fulfilled, and she was relieved of her duties as Rocky aimlessly tries to figure out life after boxing and honor his glory days.

With a Rocky statue in the exhibit and another moved to the top of the museum steps, there’s been an empty pedestal where millions of tourists usually line up every year to take a photo. On June 29th, 2026, this pedestal became home to a Joe Frazier statue by artist Stephen Layne. During Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s speech at the unveiling ceremony, when she and the other public art professionals contacted Sylvester Stallone about moving Rocky to place Joe Frazier at the base of the museum, Stallone said that’s what is supposed to happen. After all, many of Frazier’s life details, such as working in a slaughterhouse and running up the museum steps while training, were borrowed by Stallone to make Rocky a fleshed-out character.

The unveiling ceremony was a family and community affair. Lifelong Philadelphians came to support the legacy of the fighter they knew and grew up with. Florence and Joe’s daughter, former world champion professional boxer and Philadelphia judge Jacquelyn Frazier-Lyde, gave a speech in front of the statue, veiled in green and black, the colors of the Philadelphia Eagles. Jacquelyn said the statue being wrapped in green was special because it was both of her parents’ favorite colors for two different reasons. It was Joe’s favorite color because it’s the color of money. It is Florence’s favorite color because it is the color of life.

When Odysseus returns home and stands in front of Penelope, he has to convince his wife that he is her husband since the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, has restored Odysseus to “the beauty of his youth.”15 At this reunion, Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus, says this of his mother:

“Oh, who can find

A woman like Penelope unkind ?

Why thus in silence ? why with winning charms

Thus slow to fly with rapture to his arms ?

Stubborn the breast that with no transport glows,

When twice ten years are pass’d of mighty woes;

To softness lost, to spousal love unknown,

The gods have formed that rigid heart of stone!”16

Penelope’s youthfulness was not restored. She could not relive her youth and regain lost time, but she does accept her husband back into her home. She moves into this new chapter of her life with the knowledge and lessons learned from her waiting period. Is Penelope’s lack of a renewed youth actually liberation? Even though Odysseus has returned as promised, she cannot forget how long it took him to finally choose her instead of a new conquest. She wears her age and memory through her weathered beauty. Is it liberating that Adrian is written out of Rocky’s story? So she would not have to provide emotional comfort during his existential turmoil?

Once detangled from balancing the duties of solidifying their husbands’ legacies, women are free to look around at the life they’ve created. Penelope witnesses Telemachus go search for his father, and he returns a stronger man. Adrian’s spirit lives on in Rocky Jr. as he tries to figure out his life beside his father’s shadow. Joe Frazier’s unveiling ceremony was a celebration of the Frazier family and their accomplishments. Florence’s legacy can be seen through the lives of her children, who’ve gone on to do admirable things for the city of Philadelphia. It could be easy to call Florence’s life one of selfless service to family and her community. Yet she’s far more than that. She’s far more than we can know, looking at her life from the outside. Florence outlived the boxing glory days and her marriage. Perhaps we should take her word for it when she said, “I have always been a liberated woman.”

Christl Stringer is a surrealist, filmmaker, writer, and ice cream connoisseur. She traps stray cats in her spare time, which makes her nocturnal occasionally, even though she is a morning person. She writes quippy essays about culture, fine art, and ice cream flavors on her Substack, In the Lick of It.

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Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. The outlet creates content and offers PR services to help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between myth-making and the historical archive. The publication has produced print magazines and digital content covering artists from around the world. The magazine hosts parties, public programming, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, SOS slows down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

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I’ve been following the discourse around why or why not the rise of artificial intelligence is inevitable. Rather than pick a side in the AI debate, I’ll insist on siding with our most precious natural resource: water. Water cannot advocate on her own behalf; she’ll never have a seat at the table in business or government hearings, unless we channel her with our voices. This essay will center on the work of Philadelphia-based performance artist Martha McDonald, touch on water-adjacent performances by Kelly Akashi (Altadena) and Kiyo Gutiérrez (LA River), and the ritual practice of mourning. McDonald’s performance uses an aesthetic of powerlessness by becoming the Schuylkill River. Her public lament acts as a form of water advocacy for both human and non-human flourishing.

To begin, Martha McDonald is a time traveler: her voice, a portal.

I attended McDonald’s performance River Ode: The Schuylkill Freed on May 30, 2026. It was one of those beautiful Philadelphia spring days. Before entering the Fairmount Water Works building, one passes people on their wedding day, professional runners, children, and the river herself, subtly flowing in the background of all our lives.

“A lot of people in Philadelphia don’t know how the Water Works worked, and what it was, what its significance is in terms of the history of water supply in the United States, and the history of technology in the United States,” stated historical consultant for the Philadelphia Water Department, Adam Levine, in an interview in 2015.

These hydraulic technologies, as well as folk histories of river life and the story of the Schuylkill herself, were central to McDonald’s performance. River Ode was performed twice by McDonald through Philadelphia Sculptors as part of the Currents exhibition on view now through August 8, 2026.

While many Philadelphians don’t know the history of how water technologies channeled water into homes, I’d argue that most people don’t understand how current water technologies work either. I certainly didn’t until this essay. Many of these technologies are hidden from public view. Philadelphia Water published a documentary about the history of Fairmount Water Works, highlighting how, at the time, the technology provided an accessible, clean drinking water solution and also prevented hundreds of accidental fires each year.

Upon entering the historic Water Works building, one walks down a flight of steps, meandering through tunnel-like corridors of the once-operable hydraulic engineering marvel, now a site of architectural history and education. Guests arrive and sit on bleachers overlooking the abandoned John B. Kelly swimming pool.

River Ode opens with McDonald’s human voice in the distance. She begins with the song, Invocation:

“I am the wind rushing over the river.
I am the tide that caresses the shore.
I am a leaf swept along in the current,
Tumbling and swirling in the falls as they roar.”

Her voice vibrates like an echo, like a ghost returning from a voyage overseas and centuries, to tell us a story.

Hauntingly, McDonald’s work immediately reminded me of a performance that took place days prior (May 23-24, 2026), called Field Set in Altadena, California, at the site of artist Kelly Akashi’s former home and studio, which were lost in the January 2025 Eaton Fires. Field Set was a collaboration between Akashi and Phil Peters. Peters had been recording Akashi’s property since May 2025, capturing the sounds of demolition and nearby rebuilding in the wake of the fires. In addition to Peters’ three-hour durational soundscapes, each day concluded with performances at 5:45 p.m. by artists with ties to Altadena: Celia Hollander, Paul McCarthy, Alex Stevens, and John Wiese.

I spoke with Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Remenchik, who attended Field Set:

“Walking through the ruins of what once was Akashi’s home and studio, Peters’ recordings filled the air, the bass moving through your chest and bones. The sound didn’t describe the aftermath of the fires; it conducted it through you. There’s no metaphor; it’s just the body knowing what happened here.”

In River Ode, McDonald’s raw—yet all the more glorious—voice was like the bass moving through your chest and bones. There is no microphone used for amplification. Her work is a lament in a place that once held water. Turbines used to spin up 22 million gallons of water daily, flowing into wooden pipes across the city, nourishing it with life.

Her body emerges from the corridor, and she walks very slowly. It’s like a funeral march. She continues to sing.

The train horn sounds in the distance.

I’m taken back to the night of the Eaton Fires in Los Angeles, where there just wasn’t enough water to be found. Thousands, including myself, evacuated, knowing things would never be the same again. I remember angry winds and ash falling from the sky. Helicopters. Firefighters exposing themselves to god-knows-what-kind-of-chemicals. Then I thought about the men who must have worked this waterworks turbine all those years ago. It caught fire two separate times, the boiler exploding. So many working-class laborers forever remain faceless, nameless.

Water can feel like a given in Pennsylvania. Our watershed plays a crucial role in the ecosystem, not just for Pennsylvanians, but for neighboring states. The Schuylkill and the Delaware River are water conduits for the entire region. If anything, flooding is more of a problem than a lack of water.

In January 2026, the United Nations declared that the world had entered an era of 'global water bankruptcy,' with some four billion people facing severe water scarcity at least one month a year. Data centers are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing drains on that supply. A single large facility can drink as much water as a town of fifty thousand.

Nearly half of Philadelphia's drinking water comes from the Schuylkill, drawing in at the Belmont and Queen Lane treatment plants. It is already a stressed river, running as much as 60 percent treated wastewater in dry stretches. Data centers often use water to cool their servers; this water turns to vapor and doesn’t return to the river. Data centers proposed upstream of Philadelphia sit in the Schuylkill watershed, meaning they’d draw from the same river system the city drinks from.

After living in Los Angeles for over seven years, I always wondered how water could flow to my shower and to the millions of other residents across the region. In reality, much of the water is piped from hundreds of miles away, from the Colorado and from the Eastern Sierra.

Having once been home to the grizzly bear and cougar, the LA River now resembles more of a concrete channel than a natural, wildlife source. Many groups are actively working to restore it to its former glory, like FOLAR and Clockshop LA. And in sections of the river, concrete has been removed to allow wildlife to reemerge. I’ve biked by many times and seen a blue heron wading in its banks. On May 22, 2026—just days before Philadelphia’s River Ode performance—an oil spill occurred in the LA River. At least 25,000 gallons of crude oil from a ruptured pipeline poured into the water. Nearly 80 birds were oiled, and at least 11 died or were euthanized. A little over a month later, on June 28, 2026, Clockshop hosted a performance piece called spawn by Kiyo Gutiérrez in collaboration with Eva Aguila. It was set along the inclined riverbanks. Framed as a ritual-performance, spawn honors the Pacific lamprey, an ancient fish once abundant, now locally extinct due to the pressures of urban development.

Gutiérrez shared this about the project:

“The river needs our love and support, especially now. In recent months, both the river and the communities that care for it have endured painful events, including an oil spill and the contamination caused by the Lineage warehouse fire, both of which affected the LA River. Returning to the river at this moment felt like a small act of care and solidarity.”

Where McDonald’s River Ode laments and also celebrates the resiliency of the Schuylkill River, Gutiérrez’s spawn honors an extinct LA River species while also inviting the community to reimagine new possibilities. And Field Set by Akashi and Peters acts as the rawest of the three: a soundscape inviting the public onto an artist’s private property, to bring in more witnesses to aid in ongoing communal grief. Together, these performances highlight the fragility, temporality, and vulnerability of our waterways and ecosystems.

Inside Philadelphia’s Water Works, the walls are worn. There are many windows through which one could gaze at the river rushing. McDonald’s dress, designed with textile scholar Kelly Cobb, was dyed to suggest the swirling waters of the Schuylkill.

“I wanted my costume to reference the classical garments worn by William Rush’s river goddess but also to transform me into the river herself as I wound my way through the room where water had once flowed through massive turbines,” stated McDonald.

And winding her way, she does. Water can’t be folded, only channeled.

There’s a certain humility in McDonald’s dress; it looks almost like an undergarment. It’s not form-fitting. It’s modest and refuses to comply with Rush’s fantasy. Rush’s original sculpture of The Schuylkill Freed used a female body as an allegory to represent the waterwheel machine. What’s depicted in Rush’s sculpture is a classical odalisque reclined, a busty woman in a form-fitting dress lounging alongside the waterwheel. Behind her, water gushes from a vessel. This image of a docile, compliant woman has long been a fixation in male fantasy. Historically, men have used this allegory of a river nymph to subjugate or validate their desires to control the river for their own pleasure or profit. And McDonald is not having any of that.

I think about Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s more direct and confrontational performance, In Mourning and In Rage, in Los Angeles in 1977. This piece was in response to the “Hillside Strangler” media spectacle that sensationalized female victims’ lives and created a climate of fear. Where McDonald’s performance activates water as a female victim, Lacy’s work invoked ten very tall women robed in black, like 19th-century mourners. The performance successfully generated significant press, causing City Council members to voice support, and the Rape Hotline Alliance pledged self-defense classes.

In Douglas Crimp’s Mourning and Militancy, he argues that mourning and activism are not opposed, and that unmourned losses produce melancholia and political paralysis; a movement requires both. Within the simple, elegant craftsmanship of her dress, was McDonald also arguing this? Who will mourn the losses of the working class and our rivers?

She sings a staccato-like chant, Building as Machine, in which she uses mallets to strike handmade glass gongs hanging from the ceiling. McDonald’s lyrics depict the Water Works when it was once in motion, pushing water up the hill into a basin that held the city’s water, where the Philadelphia Museum of Art now reigns. With the glass gongs still rocking, she swirls around the corner, sits on a wooden stool, and begins to play a wooden instrument called an Appalachian Dulcimer. She sings a folk river song she wrote called The Schuylkill Rangers, about real-life pirates from Grays Ferry. Part of the song goes like this:

“Oh, chasing gold and riches,
They lined their pockets well,
Raiding wharf and warehouse
Like bats straight out of hell.”

Not unlike the Grays Ferry pirates, there’s something shady (and terrifying) happening with the rise of AI data center development across the nation. However, the Grays Ferry pirates McDonald acknowledges were poor Irish river thieves, not billion-dollar private developers, or owners of industrial monopolies like the railroad. There lies the class problem at the heart of this essay. Within the song, she sings:

“Now can you really blame them,
What else could they have done?
Brutal toil and low wages
Of the mines they tried to outrun.”

Having moved back to Pennsylvania, in part, because of the 2025 LA Fires, I’ve found myself smack dab in a different kind of foreboding water crisis, where developers have submitted proposals for at least 23 hyper-scale data centers across the state, with little say coming from Pennsylvania residents.

If it weren't for the yard signs protesting the East Whiteland data center around my community, I might not know it was happening in my own backyard. These developers operate under the radar, out of the public’s sight, often until it’s too late. In the case of the East Whiteland scenario, the developer downplayed that the site remains an active Superfund site, with contaminants still above cleanup goals. The township approved the project, and the developer’s work began, until neighbors reported dust plumes rising off the ground. The township ordered a temporary halt for EPA review. The battle is certainly not over.

Where the Grays Ferry pirates stole cargo and were hunted, these data center developers buy up cheap, contaminated land, hire working-class labor to do the dirty work for them, and turn their heads when the community’s water source turns brown.

There is silence before McDonald plays the glass armonica. She wets her fingers in a glass bowl, like before prayer or entering a sacred place of worship. She sings Lament of the River, a story of how the Schuylkill entered a season of overdevelopment:

“They dug canals and locks in me and hollowed out my banks
To float their barges on my back, carry timber, coal and shanks.
They dumped their factory waste in me ‘til I ran black as coal.
Amid the offal, paint and dye, I nearly lost my soul.”

Philadelphia-based artist Charles Jarboe built the glass armonica she plays. Originally invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, this historic instrument-turned-contemporary-art-object invokes the United States’ Semiquincentennial and conjures Franklin, a Founding Father.

The freeway roars in the distance.

In this space, there is momentary stillness.

She begins playing the armonica, and it’s almost like a keyboard. It sounds eerily like strings. It spins like a lathe, or like a turbine.

McDonald has long been fascinated by history, memory, impermanence, and the loss of things over time. In previous works, she explored how Victorian mourning culture provided society with tools for dealing with longing and ache. While living in Australia, she saw a catalogue for an exhibition called Black in Fashion: Mourning to Night at the National Gallery of Victoria and was inspired by an essay called “The Luxury of Woe.” Where Victorian women spent significant money and time crafting their grieving gowns and performing grief rituals, in River Ode, there’s a lack of ornamentalism while still holding faithfully to the labor of handmade craftsmanship.

The term “luxury of woe” can be found in Thomas Moore’s poem Anacreontic, written around 1801: “Weep on; and as thy sorrows flow, / I’ll taste the luxury of woe.” Essentially, it positions mourning as an indulgence that not everyone can afford.

In closing, McDonald sings:

“The river waited, oh, she waited, singing her quiet song.
She waited mourning, waited night, waiting for so long.
She kept our secrets and our stories, whispered on the breeze,
Our sad confessions, our hopes and yearnings, bore them out to sea.

Then something shifted and someone lifted the sorrow from her eyes.
They dredged her bed and cleared her head so once again she could rise.
The fish and snake came back to the river, lovers and children found her charms.
Then late one night when the moon was full, a river otter swam into her arms.”

Return of the Otter is a testament to the resilience of nature despite man’s attempts to control it. The canals described in her song remind me of the LA River’s concrete channels and the current push and pull of human intervention and natural rewilding. While River Ode is not a Victorian mourning piece, McDonald still sings a song of lament aloud as a tool to help attendees process their own losses. She uses an aesthetic of powerlessness: a plain, handmade dress, and sings a song about a submissive river waiting. Waiting itself is a feminized action explored in the 15-minute monologue poem, Waiting, by Faith Wilding, in which a woman’s entire life is spent waiting: for maturity, marriage, children, aging, and sleep.

She ends the performance with a seemingly cute description of an otter swimming into the river’s arms. Yet, as a new mom, this image is not cute, or wholesome, or happy ending, to me. Here, the river is Mother—once too sick to shelter or protect her young—now she can embrace her long-lost child. There is nothing cute about that kind of reunion. So while I, too, am feminizing the river—unlike Rush’s odalisque nymph—this Mother river has seen trauma, but still chose to embrace, to nourish, and to prevail.

There was never a moment when McDonald’s performance drifted into sentimentality. There was a refusal of mass production and a quiet revolution toward the handmade. Her earnestness was not ignorant, but an understanding that slow study of the past is important for informing the present and the future. McDonald educates and consoles. One wades in her work, soaks it up, even basks in it.

The lathe-like armonica stops with a confident click. McDonald walks toward the audience. The performance ends.

We are made up of at least 60 percent water. When McDonald speaks for the river, could the river actually be speaking through her? Rather than McDonald speaking on behalf of a voiceless body of water—a victim—is she calling us to be the “something” and the “someone” that “shifts” and “lifts the sorrow”?

It’s a luxury to attend a performance like River Ode, Field Set, or spawn. And to turn a faucet on, and clean water flows. Water is not a given.

If you would like to get involved in protecting our community and local waterways, I’ve also put together a Pennsylvania Data Center Fact Sheet.

A note on how Space On Space is currently funded:

This Substack is funded by reader support. Writing reviews, interviewing artists, and covering Philadelphia’s art ecosystem takes a lot of time. If the writing here has been useful to you, a paid subscription is the most direct way to support and go deeper. I provide exclusive essays, interviews, and PR advice for artists under the paid tier.

Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. The outlet creates content and offers PR services to help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between myth-making and the historical archive. The publication has produced print magazines and digital content covering artists from around the world. The magazine hosts parties, public programming, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, SOS slows down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

spaceonspace.com

WEIGH-IN

Everyone who has visited Rising Up: Rocky & the Making of Monuments can clearly see the exhibition’s ambitious swing at unpacking the movie-prop-turned-statue within the context of power dynamics, pop culture, and civic mythology. Although some of the conversations feel like feints more than jabs, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is clearly relying on street-level populist imagination for its cognitive hooks.

As guest curator Paul Farber more openly notes in his podcast, The Statue,1 the deeper problem is what happens when the wannabe strongman and wannabe underdog get to write the hero story. Built on bravado and idealism rather than nuance, it tends to be clunky, solipsistic, and conveniently blind to the actual marginalized figures in its midst.

Fictional underdogs, polished across hours of screen time or incredibly fabricated campaigns, are granted just enough flaws to feel human but not enough to implicate the systems around them. It’s the same sleight of hand Sylvester Stallone himself performed when he compared Trump—definitively not an underdog—to Rocky Balboa. The myth so thoroughly seduces that it obscures rather than illuminates, their bronzed heads too busy posing for strength to notice the truth flying right over them.

The New York Times covered Rising Up not once, but twice, and this magazine featured a local review earlier this month. Combined, these critical musings give a thorough take on the Rocky statue’s journey from movie prop to polarizing civic monument to its current place within the museum’s walls. They praise the exhibition for its “depth and moments of grace” (Hawthorne, Times) and offer a nuanced critique around its use of “Rocky as a filter to perform engagement with statue politics while avoiding its fault lines” (Sullivan, Space On Space).

This essay instead focuses on the Rocky statue itself, using mythology and pop culture as a lens to ask what it means to center a wannabe strongman at a time like this.

UNDERCARD

It is neither a difficult nor novel conceit to acknowledge that fictional figures can often be more influential role models than real people.2 Fictional heroes demonstrate an equal if not greater influence on everyday life than real people, and real heroes are often fictionalized beyond their original value. Actual or imagined, their foundations in reality matter less than the real-time energy and thought we pay them.

This becomes particularly true if, and when, we build monuments to them.

The exhibition provides nuanced frameworks that explore the “meanings and mythology of the Rocky statue” and various investigations into power dynamics (the word power appearing in nearly every didactic at the entrance to each of its six galleries).

Racial power dynamics play a major role in the exhibition. Wall texts name early boxing contests as “often entangled with systems of exploitation and exclusion, including enslavement, and, later, the precarious lives of the working class, immigrant, and newly emancipated Black communities,” and the show highlights the massive shadow the fictitious Rocky Balboa (white) cast over the real-life Joe Frazier (Black).

The exhibition gives Frazier his moment with a full gallery dedicated almost exclusively to him, even conspicuously directing Rocky's shadow away from Frazier in the subsequent room.

Yet, in a sport dominated at the championship level by BIPOC fighters and white owners (think networks, promotion companies, and media rights), Rising Up glosses over the real origins of prize fighting in the USA. It’s perhaps one of the exhibition’s few sloppy punches. A bit more attention to this discourse would have gone a long way in setting the stage for the power dynamics in contemporary boxing.

MAIN EVENT

It’s no small task to separate the art from the artist-commissioned-by-a-Hollywood-star-to-fabricate-a-statue-of-a-fictitious-character-that—as described by said actor—is a euphemism for the entire city of Philadelphia. It’s an even taller task to ask an audience to do this with you, as Farber and his team set out to do.

When the Rocky statue was placed within the walls of a museum, a work of art was invented from a movie prop, asking questions about the underlying system by which “art” is chosen or deemed worthy for museum exhibition. This query, particularly as it applies to public monuments, is Farber’s driving question.

Something I appreciate about this statue’s storyline is that, by moving from the street onto a pedestal with ‘do not touch’ placards, the exhibition asks us to objectify the statue itself. It leverages the schematics of museums—of ethnography and of anthropology—to flip the gaze onto Rocky, a buffed-up white strongman.

To use the slang of the demographic the art museum so clearly wanted to attract with its failed PhAM campaign, Stallone checks all the boxes as a looksmaxxer and mogger.3 Perhaps not the OG—I’d assume that title is held by Achilles, Narcissus, or Alexander the Great—but, at a reported 2.8% body fat with a chiseled jaw, definitely a 1980s poster boy. Listed at 5’10” and a known user of lifts around taller actors, Stallone may also have been on the vanguard of tiptoe-maxxing.4

I think it is important to note here that Stallone not only played Rocky but also wrote and directed the film. He was the person in power who decided to have a legitimate bronze statue made of himself. As the exhibition details, he posed for hours, took multiple face casts, formally directed the sculptor, gave the statue to Philadelphia (no, I insist you keep it), and eventually created two more casts. As far as mogging goes, this is the stuff of a Clavicular5 wet dream.

Let’s also look at who Stallone (remember: writer and director) chose for Rocky’s meaningful prize-fight opponents (read: antagonist because we’re talking about movies): Black man, Black man; bigger Black man; Russian; and then a slight deviation in Rocky V, where the main antagonist is not a fighter but a bombastic promoter with the catchphrase Only in America! clearly modeled on the notorious real-life promoter, Don King (not shockingly: he’s also Black). Essentially, Rocky was very busy beating up white America’s biggest threats.

In this way, Sly reads far more Trumpian than the curators would like to acknowledge. And this is the blatantly problematic part of centering Rocky and Stallone at the same time that a golden statue of Trump, publicly defended and praised by Trump himself, is being erected.6

In staging an exhibit around this character, it is hard to divest from conversations around the pernicious effects of rugged individualism, the American Dream, and racism. Farber’s podcast unabashedly dives into these conversations with more gusto and self-awareness than Rising Up.

Looking at the exhibition's photo archives that A. Thomas Schomberg used to create the statue, Rocky’s musculature seems to be a rather inflated version of Stallone. And, when viewed from the right (read: wrong) angles, it even makes the statue’s head appear comparatively small.7 A pre-roided-out Stallone commissioned the monument as a movie prop in 1980. It seems to have portended within his bronze facsimile, and with the help of Schomberg, his own beefy corporeal future. This is called heroic scale—the bronze is Stallone at 150%.

Perhaps more importantly, strictly from a formal sense, I’m amazed by the flatness of Stallone’s gluteal region and legs as rendered by Schomberg. With all the other corporeal swelling taking place in this statue, I’m surprised Stallone didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to enhance his lower extremities. Any boxer worth their weight will tell you punching power originates from the ground up. For comparison, sportswriters and announcers often categorized Frazier as having “tree-trunk legs.”

With this in mind, the Rocky statue steps into its role as the literal and metaphorical centerpiece of the exhibition perfectly: an upper body for show built on a flat base.

Speaking of lowers, the underdog myth, pervasive in Rocky and Rising Up, is legitimately irresistible—and deeply American. The exhibition leans into Rocky’s role as the patron saint of blue-collar grit in Philadelphia, a city that clings fiercely to the dark horse identity. But the underdog story, for all its visceral inspiration, quietly reinforces the masquerade of the American Dream. As a salient example, the Brookings Institution ranks Philadelphia last among its peers in upward economic mobility. At its best, the underdog lens aligns us with the marginalized and disenfranchised. But if everyone wants to claim the identity, it becomes nearly impossible to see who the real underdogs actually are.

POST-FIGHT ANALYSIS

One of the curatorial wall texts in Rising Up notes that a boxer’s value was demonstrated through violent sacrifice, endurance, and struggle.

Unfortunately, with limited versions of masculinity presented to our youth, these are the same benchmarks many boys and men use to measure their value and self-worth.

As Hawthorne astutely notes in his review, “Rising Up turns out to be the museum show American men didn’t know we needed.”

Although true, the exhibition still runs the risk, particularly for those who may not be paying close attention, of normalizing or ironically minimizing its intended target into a position of even greater strength. In this case: performative strongman masculinity.

On one of my several visits to the exhibition, I met a former boxer who, simply judging by the size of his shoulders, had dedicated much of his life to The Sweet Science. It turns out he also spent time inside the maximum-security State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Graterford in both the boxing and mural art programs.8 While we were talking, two young adults, both looking like they had come from the gym and followed Clavicular, also entered the conversation.

Perhaps inspired by Rocky, they jumped at the opportunity to talk about who we thought the Greatest of all Time (GOAT) is in boxing. I deferred to the former boxer, who, I suppose, is worth noting, was Black. As he pondered the question, the two wannabe strong bros (both white) decided to answer the question for themselves.

According to their logic, because: 1) Muhammad Ali (whose most well-known nickname is The Greatest) once said Mike Tyson was a better boxer than himself (even though the two never fought because they competed in different eras); and 2) Jake Paul (then 27) won a fight against Tyson (then 58), these two posited, with what I can only assume was true sincerity, that Jake Paul is the greatest boxer of all time.9

I praise the exhibition for getting this mix of people into a museum. It is an achievement that, say, the incredibly moving but more nuanced Noah Davis exhibit or the upcoming Duchamp exhibit would struggle to accomplish. Sports may be the most unifying cultural binder we have, penetrating social, economic, racial, political, class, and religious barriers.

My own personal experiences have shown that sports spaces are far more diverse and, at times, inclusive spaces than traditional cultural institutions. Despite the art world’s professed commitment to liberal multiculturalism, it often remains an echo chamber for a specific set of left-leaning ideologies. These are, in general, ideologies that I also value and connect with, yet recognize as limited in their scope, reach, and practical application without widespread embrace and commitment to a re-examination of structures.

This form of multiculturalism, which can inadvertently also support imperialism and racial capitalism while outwardly promoting social progress, needs to be challenged by a genuine commitment to intersectionality, understanding, and plurality. True progress requires us to embrace the discomfort of engaging with differing perspectives and holding space for cognitive dissonance. I believe that the broad emotional investment in sports, when intertwined with the transformative power of art, can provide a unique and inclusive platform for initiating these essential conversations.

However, if we favor immediate legibility and populist appeal without the guidance of deeper discourse or—budget-be-damned—public programming, we risk unintentionally celebrating or promoting harmful ideologies or, in this case, false idols. I’ve been to enough Monument Lab events with the tired, What Monuments do you want to see in Philadelphia? public-sticky-note-board. Where is the actual programming?10

The museum could leverage the city’s deep love of boxing to bus more youth into its doors, partner with local boxing gyms, offer satellite OST programs, engage local artists and youth organizations around the broader themes of the exhibition, or schedule watch parties with meaningful panels around upcoming fights (Trump is hosting a UFC Freedom 250 fight at the White House on June 14, coinciding with Flag Day and his birthday, for Creed’s sake!). Where sports programming works to diversify the museum audience, coinciding arts programming could deepen understanding of the exhibition and broaden conceptions of masculinity.

Ironically, this exhibition reminded me of a better version of the Jake Paul vs. Tyson fight. Both were entertaining (the exhibition decidedly more so than the fight), yet just as Tyson never seemed to engage Paul fully, Rising Up felt more like a choreographed spar with the conversations it intended to engage. Neither fighter nor exhibition delivered a knockout blow, leaving this particular viewer wanting a bigger punch.

So, in a show honoring another rugged ‘tough’ guy, I’m simply left to ask: Where are the balls?

clancy’s Ringside Feedback

When I entered the Shed, I followed a sea of people dressed in nearly identical navy blazers up the escalators to the densely packed second floor. Among the gallerists and collectors, it was delightful to encounter so many independent journalists and critics, each of us recognizable in our headphones and wry smiles of acknowledgment. I slipped quietly from booth to booth, struck by the strong presentations from South Korean galleries. At Gallery Kukje, Haegue Yang’s venetian blind sculpture A Matter of Fact (from Dan)—Peep Asymmetry was beautifully paired with Kibong Rhee’s painting There is no place. Christine Sun Kim’s unassuming charcoal drawing Echo Trap at Gallery Hyundai was another standout. There was an obvious sense of care and intention with the artworks and artists chosen, whose work often sang quietly but confidently from the walls. This poetic sensibility felt distinctly opinionated when compared to other blue-chip galleries, which often favored the kind of commercially viable neutrality that was guaranteed to be unobtrusive and unremarkable.

No need to disrupt a formula that works.

This was glaringly evident at Pace, whose two-artist display of Maya Lin and Leo Villareal left much to be desired. I walked up to a tasteful grey box, feeling transported to a luxury hotel lobby or some minimalist spa. It was the kind of aesthetic environment that implies essential oil diffusers and hot towels could emerge at any moment. In the context of the space I found myself in, Lin’s ambitious and often ecologically informed work fell into the role of decorative marble—yard art for the wealthy. The wooden plinths used to prop up the work felt like an arbitrary material connection to Villareal’s latest series, entitled Golden Game. These wall works of fluted wood embedded with LED lights are a lateral progression from the LED strip lights familiar to anyone who has entered a college dorm room in the last decade. I felt less inclined to imagine the harmony between nature, man, and technology as I was feeling like a guest at a posh, post-minimalist Airbnb.

I joined the throngs of early-career associates in chic all-black basics up the escalators to the fourth floor. Navigating the labyrinthine array of booths, the somewhat unassuming Campeche struck me as I came around the corner. I found a series of what appeared to be found objects, metal fan grills, with what appeared to be frescos. Highlighted in the Focus section, curated by Lumi Tan, Campeche made its Frieze debut with a solo presentation of work by Abraham González Pacheco. The Tepoztlán-based artist fills in the gaps that history omits through romantic, fictionalized images that combine narrative, myth, and fact into compelling abstractions.

Have you ever wondered what William Blake’s delicate watercolors would look like as ancient artifacts from a not-so-distant future-past?

I began to circle the booth to get a closer look.

Four of these painted objects hung at opposing ends of the space, flanking three large-scale vertical paintings on paper. The central painting depicts a Guston-esque tangle of bodies, which appear as arms in a dust cloud, each brandishing a fly swatter. What at first felt like a tongue-in-cheek reference to the buying frenzy of the fair simultaneously reflects a dystopian image of a barren landscape embroiled in conflict, complete with a red sky and foregrounded by a trickle of water which may have once been a stream. The following painting came as a relief: three cloudscapes stacked upon one another. The same hand that rendered a cartoonish, violent cloud now suddenly emerges as tender and earnest a few feet away. The gestures feel urgent but ambiguous, like a storm. The viewer is left on an event horizon, wondering whether they are on the verge of arriving or almost out of sight.

I turned to the painted fan grills on the leftmost wall of the gallery. The grills have a thin swathe of concrete painted with ancient-looking pigments. The larger of the two fans is painted with concentric circles and organic decorative patterns, like a piece of cosmic pottery. The smaller grill is the delicate yellow of cooked masa.

A sunflower or sunburst pressed into a relic of urban materiality.

Pacheco’s ability to oscillate between the mundane and the sublime, the real and the fictitious, is masterful and on full display. Together, the two works on the wall operate like mysterious machinery, two cogs in perpetual motion.

Pacheco’s works feel lively, referencing a thorough awareness of art history while contributing something new to the longstanding dialogue of painting. His poetic approach to examining his personal and collective cultural history imbues the work with a haptic sincerity that stood out among the rest of the work at the fair.

I returned to the booth again before I made my way out, admiring the cracks in the concrete and curling edges of the unframed paper. Each object patinaed in real time, never coming across as fragile, but resilient in the face of time, emboldening us to do the same.

Diego Juárez is a visual artist, poet, critic, and curator from San Pedro, CA, currently living and working in Philadelphia. He is the co-founder of SENSUS, an independent quarterly publication that highlights the diverse range of emerging contemporary artists, critics, and writers working within and from Philadelphia. He received his MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and his BAs in Fine Art and English from the University of California, Irvine. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, poetry, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. His work gestures toward the sublime through the residue of industry, nature, and people.

diegojuarez.com

Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. The outlet creates content and offers PR services to help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between mythmaking and the historical archive. The publication has produced three print magazines and a mountain of digital content covering artists from around the world. The magazine hosts parties, art talks, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, SOS slows down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

spaceonspace.com

I wandered into Willed to Be, Sara Mehrinfar and Stacey Calle’s exhibition at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, open now through May 24, 2026. It was hot in the fifth-floor gallery space. The windows were open, but no breeze came through, and good thing too; I feared it would disturb the three-inch-thick rectangular plots of plain all-purpose flour spaced around the room. The room felt inviting, but precarious. Several panes of blue glass and one window-sized mosquito screen hovered above the floor, affixed to the ceiling by binder clips and metal wires. On one plot of flour were more bread loaves than I could count. On another sat a picturesque house-shaped loaf of bread—complete with a triangular roof. It was surrounded by other, taller loaves, which appeared like trees in snow-like drifts of flour. Small avalanches cascaded from the sharp edges of each plot, and it seemed as though a dollhouse-sized blizzard had come through the gallery.

The setup evoked a sense of anxiety, as though one careless movement could cause everything to collapse. When I felt a sudden urge to sneeze, I twisted away frantically to not disturb the flour cliff-sides further. Near the center, I saw that four wires hung empty. Below them were many pieces of shattered glass, and a single bread-loaf house standing erect among the shards. I learned later that a viewer had bumped into the glass, causing its fall. The artists intentionally chose to leave the remains where they fell, adding to the sense of tension within the installation.

I couldn’t help but think of Thomas Kinkade as I walked around the space. The rudimentary shapes of the bread houses for me recalled his glowing paintings of snow-dusted cottages, as did the title of the exhibition, Willed to Be. The title, a play on the idiom “to will into existence,” brought to mind the American dream, which Kinkade stated he was attempting to evoke in many of his paintings.

Kinkade is not well regarded within serious academic art circles. His work is referenced mostly to scorn it, at best called “unserious” and at worst “propagandistic.” His critics argue that it ignores important realities of American life. But prints of his work are ubiquitous in the houses of many Americans, and indeed dotted the houses of many of my childhood friends. I grew up in a series of small to mid-sized city suburbs, from Texas to West Virginia. Neighborhood blocks seemed to stretch for miles, and even if the county never fixed the roads’ potholes, we always had a tree to climb, a porch to sit on, or a backyard to set up a sandbox in. Although no one directly mentioned the American dream during my childhood, it was always a feeling in the air.

Standing amidst Willed to Be, I realized I almost wanted a bread house; I felt happy looking at them. The rolling hills of flour looked beguiling, like the cheerful backyards of my youth, and I imagined their edges as fences or grassy creek beds indicating property lines between my neighbors and myself. I felt hopeful for a future with a yard, trees, and a home.

But this sense of desire also made me uneasy. It reminded me of the gingerbread house I’d decorated in December, and I felt childish pretending I could live in a loaf of bread. And then I noticed my desire. It was startlingly similar to the American dream itself, in which wanting and getting are ever-present ideals. Especially regarding houses.

The exhibition brought up my childhood notions of house and home, wherein homes represent tranquility, like a Kinkade painting. But it also complicated those feelings by using each material to undermine the usual associations I might have with them. The hanging glass, rather than performing as a window or a material meant to be seen through, was turned horizontal and placed directly in my path, or above my head like the sky.

While bread is often a symbol for community, eating, and sharing, in Willed to Be it is used as a building material—becoming stones, trees, and houses. Each loaf was placed on the floor, and was slowly hardening, becoming more and more inedible. I realized the inherent tension between the artists’ sense of home and my own. As Yi-Fu Tuan suggests in Space and Place, space becomes place when a person fills it with their own memory and attachment. For Mehrinfar, the ‘cobblestone street’ of bread loaves reminds her of childhood memories of visiting her mom’s home country of Argentina. For Calle, the hanging mosquito screen is reminiscent of Miami, where he grew up, after moving from Ecuador as a teenager. Many of the loaves used in the installation were sourced from the bakery where Calle works.

The layout challenged me as well. Like a giant in a sandbox, I found I needed to tread carefully, lest I disturb a perfectly placed object. Even the broken glass—although an unintentional outcome from the show’s opening—worked to upend my sense of stability, forcing me to move away from where I might have walked before. Each material asserted a power over me. Although I’d pictured Kinkade cottages I’d like to move into, the materials asked that I stay away from them, rather than get closer.

Willed to Be presented “home” as a place of tension. In it, idealism and disaster lived side by side, much like Kinkade himself, who died of an accidental overdose rather than at peace in a seaside cottage. The bread houses enchanted me, the precarious structures disrupted me, and the materials contested my presumptions. Home became a place of instability, a place I wanted but could not touch.

*********

Editor’s note: While I’m certainly not god, I am 3000 miles away from Monte Vista Projects. From my zoomed out perspective, the exhibition Willed to Be reached me from a small picture on my iPhone. I’ve worked with Stacey Calle in the past for Issue #3 of Space On Space Magazine and have been following his work for a few years now. Currently, I’m in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Philadelphia is where the Pursuit of Happiness was crafted, and where the city is actively wrestling with how to tell its own story. And while I can’t attest to the effectiveness of Willed to Be from viewing it in person—that is to be determined by every guest who entered the space physically—I can say that it had an effectiveness on me from viewing it from afar virtually.

To get to where I am from Los Angeles, one would most likely travel by plane across the Great Plains—where the majority of wheat for bread is grown. Calle chose to use all purpose flour invoking wheat’s origins in America; a colonial project that weaponized food to discredit Indigenous foodways built on maize. The Europeans had counted them out from making bread that could transubstantiate into Christ’s body. These colonial settlers had limitations around what could be deemed holy, and they missed a deeper truth that still causes pervasive damage in today’s world.

The work presented in Willed to be is minimalist and plain. And without the tipoff of the press release’s curatorial statement, I may not have considered wheat’s origin stories in America. Willed to Be only uses a few basic found or baked materials. These items have a kind of ordinariness to them that makes me wonder about any kind of deeper meaning. The work holds tension, instability, unresolve, and perhaps the spiritual is the most ordinary thing. Perhaps the most spiritual thing any one of us can do, is to constantly remind ourselves of how much we don’t know. How powerful being child-like is, or even more, how powerful being around actual children is. The work of the home is between parent/guardian and child; it’s often unseen labor. Work around the home is a prayer for daily bread. Willed to Be for me is a reminder to approach life with the eyes of a child and to attempt to zoom out.

Willed to Be: Sara Mehrinfar and Stacey Calle
On view at Monte Vista Projects through May 24, 2026
1206 Maple Avenue, 5th floor, #523
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Katherine Kesey is a writer and fine artist based in Los Angeles. She has an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. Her writing can be found in KAIROS Literary Magazine, Bristol Noir, and Space on Space Magazine.

katherinekesey.com

Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. The outlet creates content and offers PR services to help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between mythmaking and the historical archive. The publication has produced three print magazines and a mountain of digital content covering artists from around the world. The magazine hosts parties, art talks, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, SOS slows down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

spaceonspace.com

The recurring intermission just after this musical number fixed the lyrics firmly in my head, and now, years later, they’ve taken on a new meaning. More than silly words to encourage small children, My Favorite Things is a model for slow looking, for appreciation of the little things, and for heightened attention, which is a remarkably restorative practice against the overstimulation of the contemporary visual landscape. New York Art Week, for example, held just so much stuff. So much money. So many booths. So many people. It felt difficult to appreciate any of the art. Crowded aisles, standoffish gallerists, I was feeling quite overwhelmed. But in creating a list of my favorite things, I don’t feel so bad.

Last week, Independent stood out for the participating galleries’ preference to show only one or two artists per booth, a strategy that gave viewers a clearer picture of each artist presented and created a rhythm across the booths. Here are my six favorite moments from Independent this May 14-17 at its new Pier 36 venue in far East Chinatown.

1. Eleanor Conover’s shaped canvases at Abattoir Gallery

I’ve been following Eleanor Conover’s work since a serendipitous encounter a few years back. Walking down Horatio toward the Whitney Museum, I caught a glimpse of Conover’s shaped canvases installed as a part of REGISTERED at White Columns. Her new works presented by Abattoir Gallery maintain what I have known of her stretcher structures, resisting not just the assumed rectangle of a painting but also the fixed depth of the canvas from the wall. Her canvases bow out from the wall like faceted gems reflecting the light, or like the literal mountain forms rising perpendicular to their base.

The canvases themselves are a composite of many sections quilted together, forming the architecture of their painting and breaking up space with the seams of each section. Conover’s marks in paint, dyes, and even drawing materials like graphite reinforce or defy the underlying structure. Sometimes the crazy network of stretcher bars peeks through a particularly sheer section of material. Some of the paintings even incorporate pockets sewn into the canvases to hold bits of rock, a reminder of Conover’s commitment to the landscape even through the language of abstraction.

2. Johan Samboni’s carved brick figures at SGR Galería

Samboni’s was my favorite sculpture on view at Independent, both for the material specificity of the work as well as the consideration of the installation. Where many booths seem to just set the sculpture on a basic pedestal (which is also often the wrong size for the artwork), Samboni’s brick figures were arranged on reclaimed wood shelves and rough-hewn sawhorses. When artists define the installation of their work by building the support into the work itself, they extend the artwork into space, changing its presence from one of random appearance to quiet confidence. The provisional feel of the shelves and sawhorses recalls the “obra negra” phase of construction described by Samboni, where brick and mortar remain exposed. Samboni’s references to an unfinished state connect to his discussion of cycles of erosion and rebuilding across family history and identity.

3. Dan Gunn’s puzzle-piece forms at Pentimenti

Dan Gunn’s forms are shaped birch wood pieces puzzled together and secured with nylon cord. The result is a strange hybrid between a sculpted 3D model of the object and a rendered 2D representation of its form. The negative spaces between the birch pieces create the drawing, a mesh that sections the space. I was particularly struck by his dishrag forms. Suspended from a single nail, they gently succumb to gravity in a way that seems to defy their wooden construction. Gunn’s work reflects on his experience growing up in the Midwest and on everyday objects that serve as indicators of regional identity. A Philly resident myself, I was on the lookout for galleries and artists with a connection to my city. Gunn is based in Connecticut, but Pentimenti is in Philadelphia. I’ve been observing a preference for hybrid art forms in the city—something that doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional categories of painting or sculpture. Gunn’s work is emblematic of that hybridity. His process is reminiscent of craft traditions like quilting, which rely on assembling smaller pieces to form the whole.

4. Ian Davis’s darkly humorous gatherings at Galerie Judin

Ian Davis’s meticulously painted scenes portray large gatherings of identically dressed figures, seated placidly or walking in formation. Relying on the uncanny unison of the figures’ actions, dress, and the orderly environment they find themselves in, the paintings relay a deep uncertainty and a sense of being just one tiny part within a larger organism. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry at the reminder of fixity in systems beyond my control. I thought of Franz Kafka’s absurdist narratives, highlighting the incomprehensible mess of bureaucratic systems of power. As is the case with Kafka’s writings, Davis’s audience is never treated to a reveal or explanation. The paintings keep the viewer in a place of tension, wondering how these figures could have gotten themselves into this position and whether they will ever get out.

5. Rika Minamitani at Tomio Koyama Gallery

Rika Minamitani may be Nicole Eisenman’s long-lost cousin for her similarly striking use of color and blend of realistic and illustrative renderings of figures. The compositions rely on both humor and sincerity in their anecdotal compositions. The viewer feels like they have arrived mid-conversation. I felt a particular kinship with her painting of an octopus as the artist in the studio, many arms trying to accomplish many tasks at once. Even with eight arms, it’s a challenge to work at the speed of thought when inspiration strikes.

6. Kentaro Okumura at Vardaxoglou

Easily my favorite work I saw anywhere in New York last week, Okumura’s paintings are a texture and color dreamland. Ranging in scale from tiny to very large, the mark-making is fast, but the surface quality is slow. My favorite work was a small rusty cross hovering in a dimpled, heavily built-up field of blue and green paint. Working with abstraction, Okumura’s paintings maintain a deep connection to the embodied experience through the specificity of his color relationships and use of high and low contrast. Rather than represent the sight, Okumura creates the feeling of that experience, like the feeling of walking out of a dark room into a bright summer day, or the feeling of looking off over the ocean toward the horizon. We actually see neither water nor sunshine, but we feel them.

I could keep adding to my list, but I don’t want to dilute my designation of favorite. If I’m not careful, a few of my favorite things could turn into an exhaustive catalogue of all the beautiful moves made by the many artists represented by the 76 galleries at Independent. It’s worth reiterating that my willingness to go on adding to what I noticed and appreciated was made possible by the prevalence of solo or duo shows at the fair, a strategy that helped shift the experience away from shopping for a product and back toward really looking at and experiencing an artwork. And, not being a gallerist or business person myself, I suspect that this viewer experience may actually help collectors make better or more confident decisions about artworks they would want to live with. A viewer’s ability to assess what they like in an artwork is made easier through a slower pace, where people can notice the details and determine their favorite things.

Macy West (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based artist and writer. She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and her BFA from Louisiana State University. Her practice explores artistic and scientific visualization through painting, drawing, and printmaking. She has been included in exhibitions at Pink Noise Projects, Ice Box Projects, Frameworks Gallery, 82Parris, and Bond Millen Gallery. In 2025, she co-founded SENSUS magazine, a quarterly arts publication highlighting contemporary art in Philadelphia.

Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. The outlet creates content and offers PR services to help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between mythmaking and the historical archive. The publication has produced three print magazines and a mountain of digital content covering artists from around the world. The magazine hosts parties, art talks, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, SOS slows down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

spaceonspace.com

Review by Joni Sullivan

Since 2006, the Rocky statue—a movie prop left over from the filming of Rocky III—has been drawing long lines at the bottom of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps, technically city property. The monument receives as many annual visitors as the Statue of Liberty—nearly 4 million. Before the pandemic, the PMA welcomed roughly 750,000 annual visitors; that’s less than 20% of Rocky’s numbers.

After years of side-eyeing the mythic local hero, the museum has finally embraced him. In 2024, they installed a second Rocky, on loan from Sylvester Stallone, at the top of their steps. This year, the PMA brought the original statue inside its galleries, while a statue of world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier will take its place at the bottom of the steps. In tandem with this move, the PMA presents a survey of boxing, monuments, and Philadelphia, using Rocky as a filter to perform engagement with statue politics while avoiding its fault lines. The exhibit functions less as a critical examination of these themes and more as a safe celebration. The contents smell of a radical curator capitulating to the demands of an art institution. Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments is on view now through August 2, 2026.

Moving the statue caught Philadelphians’ attention. Locals are invested and have opinions, evidenced across local press and online forums. In the ever-reliable Philadelphia subreddit, a user complains that they “have real disdain for people who will take photos on the Rocky steps but not even consider entering the city’s world-class art museum when they’re literally right there.” Another user counters that “it’s pretty understandable when you consider taking a picture with Rocky is free and the cost for a family of 4 to get into the museum is over $120 after taxes.” These are nuanced, lived opinions from people who have genuine, layered relationships with the city.

National coverage of the exhibit rings less thoughtful. Coinciding with the opening, Jimmy Fallon included a sketch on The Tonight Show featuring satirical (read: bizarre and unfunny) interviews that fail to mention why the statue was moved or name Joe Frazier. While the broader public may view Philly’s Rocky as unworthy of critical attention, locals are engaging in a complex mythology on display in civic space—a reality the PMA and guest curator Paul Farber are attempting to address.

Unlike Fallon, Farber brings local insight and credibility as a Philadelphia native. He is the director and co-founder of Monument Lab and host of the NPR podcast The Statue, a six-part narrative podcast about the Rocky monument. By bringing the original statue indoors, he aims to invite the millions of outside visitors into the galleries, while simultaneously provoking the museum to acknowledge the vibrant public culture happening on what he calls the “people’s pedestal” of the front steps.

In a recent Philadelphia Magazine interview ahead of the exhibit, Farber discusses several instances of statue dismantlement, including the 1776 melting of the King George III statue for Revolutionary War bullets after the reading of the Declaration of Independence, the 2020 removal of the statue commemorating Frank Rizzo, former police commissioner and Mayor of Philadelphia, and Donald Trump’s recent attempted censorship of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House. In this exhibit, however, Farber argues that the statue and steps function as a unifying space, capable of fostering dialogue and collective healing.

The exhibit is organized into eight galleries spanning antiquity to contemporary art. Structurally, the first half operates as a historical survey of boxing. Black American boxers are given their deserved spotlight in early works depicting formerly enslaved, American-born boxer Tom Molineaux up against English champion Tom Cribb. A bust and a series of black-and-white photographs show Alabama-born boxer Joe Louis, whose 1938 defeat of German boxer Max Schmeling symbolized the battle between democracy and Nazism.1

The exhibit then shifts its focus to the boxer as celebrity, Philadelphia, and Joe Frazier. Before Rocky, Frazier was punching hanging beef carcasses in a Kensington slaughterhouse and training on the steps of the PMA. Frazier, a Black man who beat the odds of poverty through incredible hard work and grit to become heavyweight champion of the world, is history’s real underdog-hero. His story informed the Rocky character, whose white, working-class narrative provides a safer archetype.

In the gallery titled “Primetime,” the crossover between athletes and pop art is highlighted by works from Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Warhol’s screenprints of Muhammad Ali are positioned near a small television playing footage from the 1971 Fight of the Century between Ali and Frazier, anchoring the historical reality of the sport against the fictionalized hero in the next room, who is dramatically spotlit to cast an iconic silhouette on the back wall—the thematic center of the exhibition. Rocky is still the hero, his shadow ultimately eclipsing Frazier’s, again.

I listened to guests discuss the exhibit: “I grew up watching Joe Frazier, you know.” “Oh yeah, I know all these guys. You know they’re missing a lot of guys, if they wanted to do it that way.” I realized this guest wished the show were more boxing-oriented. At first, I thought that maybe he was missing the point. But then, maybe the point was not straightforward. “Boxing” was emerging as a conceptual metaphor for social justice, with Rocky as a great unifying monument.

The second half of the exhibit reads like a contemporary group show where the viewer is led directly from uplifting fiction into turbulent present. A compelling inclusion is the performance photography from Becoming an Image by Cassils. A nude Cassils fights a clay plinth in total darkness, illuminated only by a camera flash; the resulting battered clay was cast in bronze and is displayed alongside the images. The artist’s goal is to “bear witness to the often-underreported violence against transgender communities.” In the same gallery, photographs of the 2020 protests on the PMA steps are displayed. Here, Farber’s thesis plays out well; the museum and the public merge.

In the last gallery titled “Underdogs Rising,” Hank Willis Thomas’s Solidarity is prominently displayed. The bronze arm raised in a fist immediately invokes track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting for Black liberation at the 1968 Olympics. However, an extended label notes the pose has recently been appropriated by political leaders to express strongman tactics, referencing a photograph of Donald Trump following the 2024 Butler assassination attempt. Has this image become a monument, too? The exhibition raises the question but hesitates to answer it. By pointing out the gesture’s mutation from oppressed resistance to populist authoritarianism, the exhibit touches a live wire regarding how political power weaponizes imagery—only to pivot back to the safety of the underdog narrative in neighboring works that emphasize the fight of the oppressed without confronting the monuments of the oppressor.

These hesitations highlight a broader evasion. The PMA is mounting a show about the nature of monuments at a time when America’s relationship with public statues is intensely fractured. I thought of the Christopher Columbus statue in South Philly that was guarded by citizens with guns in 2020; the Confederate statues that have been decommissioned since 2015—a subject tackled head-on by the concurrent MONUMENTS exhibition co-presented at MOCA and The Brick in Los Angeles in which Farber has personally been a collaborator; and the protest art installations of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands in front of the White House. By using Rocky as a filter, the show commits fully to the mythology of perseverance and avoids grappling with today’s fraught reality of American monuments and more overt political imagery.

To complicate things further is Sylvester Stallone himself. In November 2024, the actor introduced his longtime friend Trump at a Mar-a-Lago gala as “the second George Washington” and was subsequently named both a Trump “special ambassador” to Hollywood and a Kennedy Center honoree. This is crucial context that the exhibition—organized in active partnership with Stallone and built around a statue cast from his likeness—never acknowledges. Can the monument be separated from the actor, and the actor from the politicians he actively champions? The museum’s evasion relies on the hope that it can.

At the end of the exhibit sits a tiny replica of the Rocky monument, Rocky with Missing Arm (Altadena, California). It was a gift from the sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg to comedian Max Silvestri, who lost his home in the 2025 Southern California wildfires. When Silvestri returned to sort through the rubble, he found that the replica had survived the blaze, missing one arm.

“I’m gonna take finding a melted statue of the ultimate underdog as a lovely omen: don’t count Altadena out,” Silvestri noted in an Instagram post.

The melted Rocky stands as a testament to what visitors are looking for when they line up at the museum steps. People see themselves in Rocky; they see resilience, grit, and hope in an underdog. So they want his photograph. They want to rub his toes. Maybe they will even go inside the museum to learn more. But, as Farber notes, “it’s really important to have symbols that last beyond your generation, but I don’t think that a monument alone saves us.” Ultimately, the PMA uses Rocky to soften the political turbulence raging outside its walls in service of “collective healing,” stopping short just as the difficult dialogues begin.

Joni Sullivan is a painter, writer, and educator based in Princeton, NJ. She currently teaches painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Sullivan holds an MFA from Boston University and a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University, and her critical art writing has been published in Philly Art Blog and Title Magazine.

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EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

INFORMATION SPACE presents a group show about baseball called Shoulder to Shoulder, Skin to Skin, currently on view through May 2, 2026. Curated by Adam Franklin, the exhibition includes work by Mary Champagne, Graig Kreindler, Jamison Mead, Bucky Miller, and Alexandria Nazar. There’s something for everyone, even baseball haters. Especially for baseball haters. Certainly for lovers too: paintings, sculpture, installation, drawings, photographs, archived history, balls, and bats. Franklin shared a dense curatorial statement with me. I recommend that someone with a PhD view the exhibition. But, until then, you get this mom in the suburbs.

Shoulder to Shoulder, Skin to Skin’s press release positions itself in the context of the nation’s 250th birthday. Franklin states, “We aim to examine the grand contradictions of our national pastime and one of our most notable cultural exports. The body of work grapples with these complex contradictions and realities of the game in a complete and confrontational manner.” I question the word complete, but agree it is confrontational. Weaving humor, material craft traditions, and historical archive, Shoulder to Shoulder, Skin to Skin wrestles with race, class, male bonding, and intimacy, all while keeping this non-baseball art lover engaged. We’re reflecting on centuries of bats hitting balls. 250 years of inconsistent storytelling, fraud, and fun games. Since the beginning of time, men have been touching each other in public. Often, the touch has been violent, aggressive, dominating, an exercise of power. Or avoided at all costs for fear of judgment. Male touch has always been political. This exhibition asks if it can also be tender.

To start, I, for one, am a hater of baseball.

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Entering the threshold of Big Ramp’s gallery for the first time reminded this writer—for only a brief moment—of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2022 by Mika Rottenberg. In Rottenberg’s exhibition, one walks through a doorframe hung with multicolored tinsel curtains, a fun and dazzling accessory within the austere atmosphere of the blue-chip mega gallery. On the other hand, Big Ramp’s entrance drapes PVC strip curtains: utilitarian, temperature-controlled, dust-resistant, practical, and see-through. Big Ramp is a warehouse gallery that also serves as artist studio spaces in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. And as the name suggests, here one descends a big ramp into the madness of art mystery. This is the setup of Smokesignals, a two-person exhibition by Diego Juárez and Gianna Santucci, curated by Macy West, on view now through April 25, 2026.

The coasts unite in Smokesignals: Juárez grew up in Southern California; Santucci is from Florida. The two artists met at Tyler School of Art during their MFA program in painting and have been studio mates since August 2023. The Pacific meets the Gulf in the City of Brotherly Love. Blue state; red state; swing state. Palm trees. Beaches. The Wissahickon. The coasts: where earth dissolves into sea. Warm air, sunscreen. The desert; the tropics. Fire and flood.

And unlike Rottenberg's institutional spectacle, Smokesignals is doing something even rawer and without the safety net of institutional irony. It asks dark questions about survival and collapse without resolution.

Still fermenting in the back room, the alcoholic cocktail from the opening has begun to grow new life. A small box of multicolored paper cranes sits next to the glass vessel. In the far corner is a cooler plugged into the concrete white wall using a mangled yellow extension cord. When it’s all over I’ll meet you by the shore: an installation by Santucci. Perched on the window above is a tray of herbs and tomato sproutlings. Taped below the window and across the wall, titled We’re buggin’ out!, are seven sheets of white paper, an elaborate list of items, presumably a survival kit of some kind. Some items seem normal enough, like: passports, cash ($6,000), social security cards, crank flashlight. Other items, funny: a deck of cards, with a note, “BOREDOM IS THE TRUE KILLER.” But also, there’s a whole page devoted to a list of drugs and specific dosages like Oxycodone 15 mg x 50, Hydrocodone 5 mg x 25, Cyclobenzaprine 10 mg x 50, etc., with a note at the bottom, “CHECK EXPIRATION DATES.”

Things get weirder. On the floor, that cooler—dirty and white—labeled BLUE MARLIN REAL ESTATE, with an outline of a blue marlin fish, sits tilted and slightly propped open. From just the right angle, if you squat and crank your head, or back up halfway across the room, you see a video of a sun slowly rising above the Atlantic. The first moment of dazzle in the show, the first moment of orange. Though the audio wasn’t functional during this particular viewing, it’s been said that the cooler plays tourism ads from a Cold War-era Florida. Not too hard to imagine what that sounds like. And daintily displayed from above is Vanguard, made of tissue paper and aluminum foil—our savior, the satellite—dangling like a lure on a fishing line, tempting the viewer to bite.

On the walls, paintings by Juárez make this writer’s heart ache. Situated close—like a friend—to Santucci’s installation, the first painting, Disaster Zone Coverage, is abstract enough that one doesn’t quite yet know where we are located. The gut thinks it’s California, but the eyes remain curious. It could be an explosion. Any fire. It’s a blurry image transfer on paper. The second orange we’ve seen, and this one is hot. A helicopter ejects water onto the scene, but never enough. On top of the image transfer is an ink-and-acrylic drawing of a limp hose, as if it had been conquered by defeat. Mangled just like the yellow extension cord, but now it’s black. On top of the ink hose on a small panel in the corner of the painting, there’s just enough blue to give you hope. But on top of that, a black rectangle with white chalk speckles.

Cooling off a bit—only for one moment—the next painting, SEPTA Infinity Room, both flattens things out and creates some geographic depth to the thickening survivalist plot of the exhibition. The painting itself is spatially compressed. We’re looking at a cracked window, and marker graffiti is present. Anyone who’s ever ridden on SEPTA knows how accurate this mark-making is. The spatial location of SEPTA puts the viewer’s body directly within Philadelphia’s metropolitan area: the city, the suburbs, and satellite towns. While the existence of public transit is perhaps better than the car getting beat up by endless potholes—like craters of the moon—Philadelphia’s transit experience, whether car, train, bus, or subway, could use some love. And that title, a direct reference to Yayoi Kusama’s most famous works, mirror rooms with lights that create the illusion of endless space. But we’re looking out a dark window and see nothing, only black.

It is within Fireproof (after Tom Phillips) that this writer begins to cry. This painting is blazing hot. No longer orange but the kind of red you will never forget. Those image transfers on paper are doing the work of many firefighters. I see palm trees, telephone poles, and modern architecture in the process of erasure. Upside-down. Yet, so far away, so foggy. Greyscale. Los Angeles. Tom Phillips—for whom the painting’s title is addressed—was a multidisciplinary artist from London who spent much of his life taking a single Victorian novel (A Human Document by W.H. Mallock) and painting over nearly every page, leaving small rivers or islands of text visible. Phillips devoted most of his life to the practice of erasure. What remains is fragmentary and poetic. This is essentially what Juárez has done and transformed in his paintings, using archived images from Los Angeles fires. And Fireproof (after Tom Phillips) may be one of the most heartbreaking paintings this writer has ever seen.

Juárez is from San Pedro, California, a neighborhood located within the South Bay and Harbor region of the City of Los Angeles. He mentioned that when the Eaton and Palisades Fires were consuming Los Angeles in 2025, he was in Philadelphia, finishing his grad program. He was checking in with friends and family to make sure they were ok, and was observing the disaster through social media, the news, and pictures sent via text from his friends. Sometimes distance can be just as painful as living it up close.

When I first saw Juárez’s paintings, I immediately thought of Edgar Ramirez’s work for his use of language and text. Ramirez grew up in Wilmington, a neighborhood directly adjacent to San Pedro, and his work explores systems of power, erasure, and resistance through abstraction and material processes. There’s something about living on the edge of earth and sea, where erosion is both collapse and yet still home. Where Ramirez uses signs from the street to create an urban texture in his work, Juárez’s work is more like an emotive poem, where the titles themselves are like a street sign. Juárez’s paintings are certainly abstract—guarded even—in the moments he does give the viewer a peek inside, what we see is apocalypse.

Now heart cracked open, this writer looks at the two remaining paintings. The smallest painting, Irrigation Control Valve Cover as The Big Bang, is one of those works you might certainly miss, given the other alluring objects in the room. It’s cosmic absurdity. Water is both origin and potential demise. Juárez recalls that the red used in View from a Radio Tower is very specific, that of the Peterson Automotive Museum in La Brea, which he recently visited on his birthday with his father. The painting itself looks like a window or a translucent screen letting light in, light out. Or that of a satellite wing. The gridded lines are a thick, blood kind of red, and chunky, spread with a palette knife, many layers. Like icing a cake. Beneath and behind the red frame is another image transfer, mysterious blue, a grey splatter, but hardly there. High above, perspective is shifted: maybe one sees more clearly, or maybe one is now too far away to see.

Circling back to Santucci’s work for a moment. Santucci was trained as a realistic, figurative painter and used to make large female nude paintings. Yet there are no nudes here. No bodies at all, actually, within Smokesignals. But the cooler is a readymade, and the installation is an assemblage of sorts. And we can thank Marcel Duchamp for his insights into what art can be: a way to freedom. Art doesn’t have to be beautiful or realistic to provoke. It doesn’t have to disclose a clear answer.

I think of Duchamp’s final work, an assemblage titled Étant donnés 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage. In English, it translates to: Given, the waterfall, the illuminating gas. The work is permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Duchamp specifically chose Philadelphia to be the home for the majority of his life’s work. Until recently, I’d always interpreted Étant donnés as an erotic desire of the artist. And it could have certainly been Duchamp’s intent. Yet, lately, with all this resurgence of Duchamp discourse with his concurrent shows at MoMA open now and Gagosian pending, I’m thinking about this work in a fresh way.

Perhaps Étant donnés is a symbol of a broken, beaten Lady Liberty lying in the grass. The lamp, still burning. Only accessible behind a mysterious gate with a peephole inside an institution. The body lies exposed in what’s meant to be a very private scene. The face is hidden. While Étant donnés holds a real gas lantern for light, When it’s all over I’ll meet you by the shore uses a projector to illuminate. Santucci’s readymade is not locked inside an ascetic art institution, but a rugged warehouse. The cooler must be peeked inside of, not unlike Étant donnés. Within the cooler is a body of another kind, that of salt water. Regardless of Duchamp’s true intentions for his final work, its mystery is where meaning is ultimately made.

The most important component of Smokesignals is that Santucci and Juárez’s works need each other. One coast may face disaster while another may be temporarily basking in sunshine. But here, neither artist is looking away from each other’s pain. They are sharing space and story. If we don’t look away while our neighbor is hurting, but actually take heed, perhaps we might not perish. Perhaps there’s still hope. If we lock arms, share stories, and drink the fermented cocktail of communion. Perhaps love is real. Perhaps the satellite won’t save us, but brotherly love will.

West’s booklet elevates her to collaborator, not just curator. There is a long history of the practice of artist bookmaking. From Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, to Sol LeWitt’s Arc, Circles & Grids, to even Tom Phillips’ A Humument, mentioned earlier, which was included in a landmark 1973 survey exhibition at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. That book exhibition is the first major survey exhibition of artists' books in the United States. For Smokesignals, West's handcrafted object includes a perfect checklist map, a brief catalogue essay, and two beautifully mournful poems by Juárez. Within the delicate art object is a black-and-white sketch of a satellite collaged atop mysterious image transfers. Another page is dedicated solely to a black billow of smoke. Like a bulletin given before mass or a flyer an activist hands out on the street corner to promote their cause. A manual, a key. Taking an object home, the viewer is provided a talisman for survival, an artifact, a memory of the art encounter, however impermanent. The work did happen, the communion beverage was shared, even if eventually everything will go up in smoke.

Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space: a media movement investigating the connections between land, power, and art. She’s definitely a mom, which makes her a futurist. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. We create content and offer PR services that help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between mythmaking and the historical archive. The publication has produced three print magazines and a mountain of digital content covering artists from around the world. We host parties, art talks, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, we slow down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

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I begin my investigation of the exhibition, In pursuit of a drifting rear view, with a deep desire for the American Dream. The mythology of this nationland, supposedly only 250 years old, is so seductive that even the critic is lulled by its temptations. I want to own a house. I want to live in a diverse, safe neighborhood, walkable, delicious food, green space, clean air. And yet I don’t see such a place anywhere. It is a dream and toxic individualism lying in wait. I want my taxes to fund programs that better my community, not war, not masked ICE officers. Not urban firestorms. Reality is a harsh and shattering fact. But memory is a lingering landscape. Currently on view at FJORD now through April 25, 2026, In pursuit of a drifting rear view, a two-person interrogation by Ava Hassinger and Christina Kerns, is an exploration in photographic materiality via a classic American road trip, but really, it’s a suspension of belief in what is real. Ultimately, it’s a question about whether we believe in America.

Through the seemingly simple act of two women road-tripping across the United States interior, with ten-plus cameras in hand and car, the two artists embarked on a pilgrimage in May 2025 from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. The City of Angels, the city where dreams are exported for the world to see; Hollywood. And also the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum, the dream and destination of the artists. A collection of thousands of images of America was gathered. The show is a free association of objects, places, maybe-places, and memories with a strong emphasis, especially on the American Southwest. Each viewer who enters the gallery is simultaneously subject, interrogator, witness, victim, criminal, and participant. Like pinning suspects to a corkboard, Hassinger and Kerns force the viewer into a space of not knowing that frustrates, creates awe, humbles, and mystifies. The show miraculously makes me feel like an alien. When speaking with the artists about this project, what I heard was that the trip felt more like a poem about a country that feels foreign.

Around the room are images on images on images, shifts in scale from tiny unframed Polaroid to large-format Inkjet on self-adhesive terylene fabric, like what could be found on an advertisement billboard or a car decal. Yet, what are these images, and what are they advertising to us? Many of them perplex the viewer. At first glance, it feels like entering a natural science museum for an alien just landed in America. One rectangular specimen, a yellow flutter of abstraction, maybe fabric, maybe a clothed body in motion, stamped upon a dazzling blue sky with clouds: Somewhere in New Mexico. Or the quirky Space Boy, Roswell, NM—taken from an actual exhibit about aliens—waves hello, dirty suit, helmet on, spaceship awaits.

The overt alienness makes me think of Esther Pearl Watson’s work. Her “memory paintings,” which often depict flying saucers, are really about growing up with an eccentric father in an economically precarious rural America. Watson’s art is very much about the failures of the American Dream and the absurd optimism that’s still somehow present. In pursuit of a drifting rear view’s alienness is more abstract and certainly not optimistic.

Also relevant is The Brother From Another Planet, a 1984 film directed by John Sayles. About a mute Black alien slave who crash-lands in the United States, specifically Harlem, and is thrust into navigating the unspoken social hierarchies of being a Black man in America. His apt ability to repair technology, made more timely by the fact that he’s being chased by two caucasian alien bounty hunters. Themes of race, immigration, class, and urban landscape are all present in the film, all present in America, all present in this exhibition.

As they say in real estate: Location, Location, Location. America sure has a lot of them, and so does In pursuit of a drifting rear view: Las Vegas, Memphis, Sedona, Roswell, Joshua Tree, and more. I see on the wall the burnt ruins of a building after a fire. I’m immediately pulled to a memory evacuating the smoke of the Eaton fires with my infant. As much as this burnt building is not an Altadena ruin, my memory and emotions are strongly tied to burnt buildings and the smell of smoke. It is here that I find empathy when I realize that the building is actually Clayborn Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. The historic church had been, at one time, a site for the civil rights and workers’ rights movements. Also, a predominantly Black community. Altadena—my favorite place in the whole world—has been left barren, heartbroken, and in need. Clayborn Temple may have made the headlines for a moment, but it has been left abandoned by America, too. And maybe we’ve all been left abandoned by America. Some much more than others. But she’s still so beautiful: the land, the views, the mountains, the sunsets. But perhaps she hasn’t abandoned us, just her masters, those behind the scenes, pulling the strings.

Circling the room once more, there are many hands. One hand in particular beckons me. It’s a white monument to someone. I see a peek of a palm tree and that blue sky I fell in love with; perhaps we’re in California. I do look at the exhibition map for this one, but it doesn’t give me any more information except Hand. Looking closer, there is no head, just draped fabric over a larger-than-life body. Are you God? Is this the afterlife? Did I make it in? I then Google, larger than life jesus hand white sculpture united states, and stumble upon a place I’ve actually been: Desert Christ Park, Yucca Valley, California. I could write an entire essay on the strangeness of this sculpture, the sculptor, and the park itself, but we’re In pursuit of a drifting rear view, so I must keep moving.

Hassinger and Kerns’ pictorial installation has sharp edges. Pistols are being pointed at Sedona Sunset, a black-framed silhouette of a hand holding an iPhone to capture a sunset. From far away, it looks like a pistol barrel pointed down at the earth. Below and behind, Circus Circus, Las Vegas, is a display of real pistols mounted and aimed as if ready to shoot the hand capturing the sunset. It’s an abstract standoff between land and monument. Like the hands, the trees, particularly the palm trees, and the Joshua Trees, are reaching upward. And nature in general is always praising the sky.

Another hand, the most mysterious of hands in the show—titled Ava’s Hand, Roswell, NM, a UV print on holographic paper—is from the International UFO Museum mentioned earlier. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Originally, I’d thought the photo was taken at a club, blasting music, DayGlo paint, and lights flashing—I’d imagined many near-naked bodies bouncing. The hand, lit from below, is touching something that looks sticky. The seduction of this holographic paper is almost screenlike. The glow. The unreal colors. The unnatural environment. The artificial. Humans and technology are attempting oneness. The glory of this picture is that it’s a children’s museum about aliens, how our perspectives can be skewed by manipulation.

I meander over to a hand holding a suitcase. Hassinger is demonstrating the use of a Walmart suitcase in Untitled, a video montage in the far corner of the gallery. Spinning and spinning, her body moves in circles, as shoppers gawk for a second and then drive by to their next errand. The performance is humorous. I think about airports and the rumble of many suitcases skirting toward various destinations, but here, Hassinger’s is spinning and spinning, going absolutely nowhere. As if using a suitcase for the first time and testing its limits. Walmart is possibly the most clear depiction within the show of the American Dream and its limits and lies. Founded by a product of said dream, Sam Walton. Walton was born in 1918, grew up on a farm, and then went on to become, for a period, the richest person in the United States. The first Walmart opened on July 2, 1962, in Rogers, Arkansas. Walmart is the largest corporation by revenue and the biggest private employer in the world.

More deeply within Hassinger’s video is the overlay. The backdrop is of Everything and the Kitchen Sink, 1996 at Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum in Joshua Tree, CA. Purifoy was born just a year earlier than Walton, in 1917, in Alabama, into a large family of sharecroppers. He eventually migrated West, perhaps looking for more freedom. Both men are of the same era and grew up deeply entangled with the land, but look at the different products that their lives produced. Purifoy, a Black man deeply conscious of the American Dream, was considered an outsider within the art world, even though he operated alongside it for most of his life without much recognition. He lived his last years in the desert, building his own museum, without support. If we compare the lives of Purifoy and Walton, we can see something very interesting about America. Both have built a form of a monument using the tools that they had.

In pursuit of a drifting rear view is dimly lit, like a dinner party; it’s cosy and inviting. Something traditionally considered women’s work—the dinner party—demonstrates the beauty of a communal gathering. It’s self-aware, and the exhibition doesn’t center the artists in the story, unlike this writer, who started this essay with “I.” No, the guests at the exhibition are central. All eyes point to the walls, but those eyes are us. We are the center of the exhibition; the bodies residing on American soil. And if we are to get even more specific, two beams holding the building up are at the center. The two wooden FJORD pillars have been wrapped in digitized foliage. Like unsuccessful camouflage, or to showcase to the aliens what a bush looks like, or to hide, or perhaps to highlight the strong support structures that hold the whole damn space together. The brown beam is wrapped in plastic land. America’s land: stolen from Indigenous inhabitants, and built on the backs of and by the hands of many many many brown people and the working class. America projects a message so seductive that people flock here for a chance of a dream that is drifting further and further into the rear-view.

In the incredible book Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories, author Deborah Paes De Barros writes in a feminist vein about an otherwise predominantly male road-trip tradition in both photography and literature. She states, “Invisible, and inhabiting space in a radically different way, women become associated not with the heroic travel between borders, but with the silent navigation of the borders themselves. This is the terrain of the nomad.” And bell hooks’ essay, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, is a beautiful reframing of the margin and the edge as a site of critical consciousness rather than deprivation. To travel anywhere as a woman, and/or a non-white person, is to occupy a different kind of space than that of the heroic, rugged male traveler.

The artists describe experiencing “highway hypnosis” when driving on the road, where the mind travels elsewhere. In Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, he argues that certain spaces, like the nest, the corner, the house, are like a reverie: a state of being lost in thought or daydreaming. The home—considered by some as the place for women—and the road, a male domain. Whereas I’d argue, the car on the highway, this “highway hypnosis,” isn’t a protective, enclosed dreaming, but an outward, uncontainable kind of thinking; the rolling hills, sweeping views, and mindless plains of the Midwest subconsciously meddle with the mind. The road is a place where one can be found and free. Though often lonely, the nomad’s journey is one of reckoning.

There’s an interesting moment in the show I keep thinking about, The Venetian, Las Vegas. It’s particularly resonating for its feeling of referencing the history of art. This image uses the building’s ornate design to resemble a picture frame. The Venetian is a luxury hotel and casino in Vegas. It’s Vegas, baby. What’s more, we’re looking at this exhibition in a converted warehouse building in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, the Holy Experiment of Quaker William Penn. The specificity of Philadelphia within this American Dream mythology is that this is the city where the dream was invented.

Space On Space’s advisor, Yesenia Navarrete Hunter, facilitated a conversation in 2021 called Untangling the Now with Mark Charles, an Indigenous politician and 2020 Presidential candidate. In the conversation, he quoted Georges Erasmus, who was a native elder from the Dene people in Canada. When he wrote about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, regarding their boarding schools, Erasmus said, “Where common memory is lacking, where people don’t share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.” This concept of common memory is useful for navigating this exhibition.

Common memory is not just Hassinger and Kerns attempting to share an experience on their road trip. It is also the issue at large within America. The majority of the residents in this land are immigrants who arrived here from somewhere else at some point. Some residents were enslaved and forced to build this country without compensation. And the original inhabitants have been stolen from, killed, and dispossessed. There is no common memory. In this lack of commonality, there is a struggle to see eye to eye or to lock arms. As bell hooks aptly repeated several times in her essay, “Language is also a place of struggle.” Since we struggle to find a common language, we struggle to accurately tell the story of a land full of nuance and disparate perspectives. And until we can all agree on the truth-telling of our history, there will be no united America. bell hooks also says, “our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.” This exhibition successfully reflects this tension of attempting to pull on history while simultaneously moving forward by the engine of a car, or time itself.

So In pursuit of: the pursuit of happiness—the slogan of The American Dream—is right in the exhibition title. The word pursuit specifically is about striving and chasing. How about we drift for a minute rather than pursue. Since the beginning of the country’s signing, it was built for white land-owning men to thrive, to dream, to flourish. At this point, I’ve heard this said many times, but in this exhibition, it paints something very clear: a drifting rear view. The further we move away from the original storytellers and mythmakers, the further we risk forgetting. And our current president—a celebrity real estate developer—is doing what he does best in a land designed for him to thrive.

I’ll say that this review could be written a million times in a million different ways, by a million different people. I chose to center myself because I am at times subject, interrogator, witness, victim, criminal, and participant within America. The photographs collected by Hassinger and Kerns could be arranged in endless ways. Every person currently residing in America could tell their story distinctly. Perhaps the potentiality of a land is its very limitation. And I don’t think America is the hero she claims to be. That is perhaps the root of the lie America has been proclaiming. All this striving and chasing a dream for what? How much is enough? The land itself is finite, not magical. Earth is held up by gravity and the laws of science, not a dream. When America fails to perform as advertised, we can’t return her like a cheap product from Walmart.

So the question remains: Do we believe in America?

**Space On Space will be facilitating a conversation at FJORD with Ava Hassinger and Christina Kerns on Saturday, April 18, from 2-3 p.m. The magazine received a stipend for participating in the conversation. This message is disclosed to reflect our SOS Ethics Policy.**

Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space: a media movement investigating the connections between land, power, and art. She’s definitely a mom, which makes her a futurist. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. We create content and offer PR services that help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between mythmaking and the historical archive. The publication has produced three print magazines and a mountain of digital content covering artists from around the world. We host parties, art talks, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, we slow down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.

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After pacing the warehouse outside on foot, a car pulls up next to me, and two people get out. I asked if they were attending Soul Stake; they nodded. We look for the door together. Also outsiders, they’d just gotten off a bus from New York to see their friends’ piece in the show. I admired their dedication to their friends. We find the door, march two flights of stairs, and meander a series of hallways until the sound of voices begins to rise. Inside, a desk is stationed with a kind-eyed person who checks names off a list. Around the room, bustling with life, was the underground. Adhered to scrim walls wrapped in translucent heavy-duty white chiffon, hung art done by over a dozen artists from an open call.

The exhibition walls themselves were displayed with direct conceptual reference to the film The Red Shoes (1948). For The Red Shoes, the production designer, Hein Heckroth, created the film's sets using materials such as chiffon, gauze, and cellophane, a direct material echo of Soul Stake. The exhibition space becomes a sort of stage set. Further solidifying the connection between the two projects, Heckroth had been blacklisted by the Nazis for refusing to leave his Jewish wife; his aesthetics were considered degenerate. Iconic film critic, Roger Ebert, described The Red Shoes as “voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don’t watch it, you bathe in it.”1 And similarly, one must bathe in the magnificent entangled handiwork of Masina and Ella.

This project is drenched in historical investigation, but specifically with an eye for the contemporary and the cunning genius of visionary social strategists. The press release names more than thirty artist participants; Soul Stake was no small feat to organize. They share that the project concept had been “cooking for several years,” but it was set into motion about six months ago. Soul Stake’s title draws from the propaganda flyer Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge by El Lissitzky. The poster depicts a red triangle, an ancient sacred geometric form that crosses virtually every spiritual tradition. Red triangles were a mark used by the Nazis to designate political prisoners–primarily communists, socialists, trade unionists, and resistance members. Here, the red triangle pierces a white circle. Soul Stake’s triangle reclaims a shape used by the Nazis to alienate as a shape of divine power, a weapon, and collective defiance.

The Nazis had banned, censored, and mocked modernist artworks and artists, claiming they were un-German, Jewish, Communist. I think about current events. I am wary of making a direct parallel between the German fascism of the 1930s and 1940s and what is currently happening in America. Yet, there are waves of similarities worth naming, and Human Rights Watch recently released research and analysis that suggests that the Trump administration has embraced a wide range of authoritarian tactics. Recently, nearly two thousand trans individuals’ driver’s licenses were canceled and revoked overnight in Kansas. A license is a document verifying someone’s identity, like wearing a triangle to mark their difference. This legislative move now outs a trans person to every authority that checks it.2 Or I think about a group exhibition that took place in September 2025 at Pepperdine University titled Hold My Hand in Yours, which was censored and abruptly closed after the Christian university took issue with some of the works’ confrontation of the country’s current immigration policies.3 Or more broadly, the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, alongside the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This sweeping move gestures a censoring of DEI and “gender ideology” grant projects that redirect funding to “empower houses of worship” and to specifically fund events related to the nation’s 250th birthday.4

The Entartete Kunst was first held by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 and consisted of 650 modernist artworks that the Nazis had taken from museums, which were poorly hung alongside graffiti and text labels mocking the art and the artists. What was designed to inflame public opinion against modernism actually amplified it to become the most visited modern art exhibition in history at that time. The exhibition traveled to several other cities. Then, exactly 87 years ago, on March 20, 1939, the Nazis burned nearly 5,000 artworks in Berlin, also on the Spring Equinox. On the anniversary of this burning is the date Soul Stake takes place. When art becomes banned, censored, and mocked, it doesn’t disappear; it goes underground, speaks in symbols, and becomes subversive. And if it gets burned, perhaps someone channels it back to life. Each piece of art included in Soul Stake references an original work in the 1937 Degenerate show.

The Soul Stake curators intend that the works “confront generational trauma, authoritarian resurgence, and the cyclical nature of cultural repression while galvanizing Philadelphia’s artistic community.” Immediately, I notice a cross painted on the fabric wall. Yet this space felt incredibly safe, inclusive, and nonjudgmental. There are a multitude of Jesuses and crosses all clustered toward the front entrance of Soul Stake. This gesture references the curation of the original Entartete Kunst. Specifically confrontational at the time was Kruzifixus, a wood crucifix by Ludwig Gies. Created as a WWI memorial installed in Lübeck Cathedral, this sculpture had its head sawed off by vandals in 1922, was repaired and then confiscated, and was later destroyed after the Entartete Kunst closed. But what is a cross for except execution? These images of Jesus were depicted as sickly, grotesque, and weak, not the supposed Aryan ideal the Nazis were after.

From around the room, there were a few striking works I stared at for a while, for I knew no one, and they were all I had. A piece by Yianni Kourmadas titled Melancholy Woman after Melancholy Girl by Heinrich Hoerle lures me in. No more than three inches in size, tacked onto the wooden wall frame, the metal eyes are literally cold. I notice eyes similar to these in other paintings around the room. If the eyes are the way to the soul, these souls are surely distant. Melancholy Woman looked more tired than Melancholy Girl; she’s older. The original painting has an orange circle, like a moon. In Melancholy Woman, the moon transforms into a tiny megaphone. Melancholy Woman stares, without blinking, into the heart of Chaia, the electronic composer, from across the room, as if signaling her story.

Raging nearby, with similar glazed eyes, glaring at me, a painting, The Lovers, two femme bodies, arms wrapped around each other, one smokes a white pipe. The painting is by Holland Fox. Bedazzled with rhinestones, body art was stuck on top of the oil paint. One body, darker skin, striped shirt with brown spaghetti strap top, and five necklaces, almost fondling the other, serious-faced, brown-haired person with a spiral tattoo and revealing clothing. Yet, both are more modestly dressed than the original work referenced, Two Girls - Half Nudes by Otto Mueller. I wonder about the relationship of those half-nudes.

Another work, Blumengarten, one of the largest in the exhibition, arrests me. Vallyn Murphy utilizes hundreds of tulle pom poms to invoke impressionist brush strokes and color, summoning the hands of Emil Nolde, who painted the original Blumengarten. Vallyn pushes the painting through a new material world. She remarks that the work is “the joy of a beautiful garden in the process of defilement.” Within the decay, materials include paint, resin, blood, hair, polymer, maggots, sticks, dirt, and some pieces of tulle scorched from being set afire. I can’t help but think about the earth inflicted by bombs and the forever chemicals released into the air. Air has no borders, and wind has a mind of its own.

Swiftly, at 8 pm, the sonic component of the evening in the form of Chaia, a Yiddish Techno composer whose work samples archival Yiddish music, begins. A pale, dark-haired woman emerges in all white, sits upon a humble white stage with a plethora of MIDI cords sprawling. I notice IVs still taped to her arms. I wonder about this. There are both masked and unmasked people at this event. And many queer and punk bodies collide, a range of ethnicities, intergenerational. For an hour, the music undulates as the bodies multiply till the room is very crowded. I see later that Chaia also performed earlier that Friday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amplifying this same frequency across a city bracing for a spring, summer, and fall season of high visibility as the nation confronts and wrestles with accurately telling its own story; the semiquincentennial.

Of all the static objects, The Sick at Night is a striking, collaborative piece by Brothers Sick: a brother duo, Ezra and Noah Benus. Stitched together like an L-shaped blanket, the piece calls forth Sick One in the Night by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. These brothers were the friends of the two New Yorkers I met upon arrival. Serendipity, I think not. Noah, who is introduced to me by the New Yorkers, unlocks the art and a missing piece of Soul Stake I could not yet name. He points to the black triangle in the tapestry, in reference to the symbol the Nazis placed on all chronically ill people. The fabric that acts as a frame is a medical gown. “What does it mean to be degenerate?” he asks me. The concept of time is quite different for people suffering from illness, he states. There’s a cyanotype image of an MRI of his head. Noah suffers from chronic migraines. A very large, multicolored hand is outstretched toward me. I first thought in reference to palm reading, now I know it’s asking me to hold it. At the top of the work is a half-oval beam of yellow light, whose nodes are shooting out of and throughout the work. Similar to how sound travels across a room or how history repeats itself. Time slowed down.

I realize we are not channeling spirits here per se, but the past. And if we’re channeling the past than maybe the past is a spirit. Or time itself is alive and talking. Pausing, I look up and appreciate the light. The lights are c-clamped to the pipes on the ceiling, wrapped in black paper to soften. At the transition from art viewing to the sonic fashion show-like sequence, Masina ascends a ladder. Ella holds the ladder below. Masina’s dress is a sparkling red, translucent, draped, hugging the body. Ella’s top and bottom are also translucent red. Both outfits had been designed by a friend, Jenna Robb, who also designed another wearable sculpture activated by Chloe Marie. Masina unplugs one light from the outlet in the ceiling. Mood lighting enacted. We’re then asked to wait in darkness for eight minutes as Chaia brings the artworks to life. People often say to separate art from the artist, but in the case of performance art, no one can do such magic. These artworks are breathing now, some very heavily. Like a veil, very thin, or the makeshift theatrical curtain behind Chaia’s body, the activation begins. I’ll mention a few below; there were ten in total.

A total balancing act, China Rain, emerges, Balancing Act 01, summoning Death as Juggler (Revolution), an unsettling woodcut by Christian Rohlfs. A long lumber plank poised atop China’s head, fastened with nothing but a loose screw, wobbles, one end a red candlestick unlit, the other a knife crassly tied to a taller candelabra with twine. The precarity of the moment, China’s shakiness, the weight of the world on someone’s shoulders; darkness and light. Like a scale tipping back and forth, measuring, judging the earth, weighing the severity of sin. Violence and also hope, perhaps extinguished by the length of time. After pacing slowly to the back of the room, China mounts a tall stool, slowly rising, still somehow balancing. The room is breathless, suspended.

Thomas Lauria, multicolored madness, walks in boldly—wearing abstractions will never do, play in waste: The Scrappening—a body suit arousing Mask Still Life III by Emil Nolde. A historically complicated painting made by a man who was himself a Nazi and an antisemite, Mask Still Life III ended up in the degenerate art show for its depiction of non-Western masks. Breathing aggressively, Lauria’s mask seems to nearly suffocate him. There isn’t a conjuring here, but a wrestling match between the original painting and the contemporary performer. The original painting conveys the tension between the facades we wear and primordial emotions, both concealed and expressed. Lauria’s body struts. Lauria’s body confronts. Too long horns, more like bug antennas, wiggle about like balloon animals or a pool floaty. Objects that are inherently playful, childlike, and silly take on a dark meaning here. Then he gets down on hands and knees, lizard lunge, and pulses. One antenna slowly inflates, and the balloon animal comes to life. The crowd is wowed by this strange magic. Then, once inflated, Lauria rises and swaggers backward, and rhythmically removes a matching flogger from their front codpiece, where he self-flagellates. Here, the activation starts to feel intimately personal and heartbreaking. The wearable is made completely of scraps of latex and one pair of holey socks. A mask is both a protector and an inhibitor. I can’t see his face, but I can hear his struggling breath; it’s not always safe to be free.

Amalia Wilson’s I Meant (Um den Fisch) waddles in blindly. Stuck within a tubular papier-mache vase, arms raised above her head, her face completely covered by the vessel she dwells within. She holds a real, dead fish in one hand and a glass vase with a twig and a small red flag in the other. Strung upon the bottom of the vase is a tailgate of vegetables that drag behind her. The fish, an actual dead body—and one of the oldest symbols in the Christian church for the body of Christ—reeks. The stench smells equally feminine and repulsive. The sight of this causes the crowd to giggle slightly for its sheer absurdity. Yet we know the absurd is often a stand-in word for horrors beyond belief. This sculpture references Paul Klee’s painting Around the Fish, hated by the Nazis because it scrambled religious iconography, treating the sacred fish as abject, even dinner. What could be so offensive about this original Klee painting? A fish out of water can’t swim.

The final act, Catching on Thieves, a gender-nonconforming, muscular brown body, hair alive, emerges from the curtain, madness becomes method. The activation title is a nod to the Nazi slur graffitied to the wall at Entartete Kunst. She holds a cardboard cutout of a life-sized naked body, large breasts, erect penis. The cutout in reference to the highly controversial and abused beyond-repair sculpture, Kruzifixus by Ludwig Gies. Since destroyed, Catching on Thieves is its physical embodiment. An almost Christ-like joy emanates from every cell of her body. Sheepishly smiling, Catching hobbles with a limp, towards the crowd. Somewhat nervous, somewhat excited, she approached someone, cell phone in hand, gesturing to take a picture with the cutout. The first observer generously agrees. I feel immediately uncomfortable, and then embarrassed by my own discomfort at the spectacle. Will she ask me to pose for the camera, too? This stunt happens several times as she slowly walks down the aisle to the cross drawing titled The Devils of Loudon are never done. At this point, Catching and the cutout disappear into the crowd. All I see is madness becomes method undulating above the crowd, in front of, because of, despite the cross. The music billows. Then, the movement and music stop. The performance ends.

Exhausted from the three-hour experience and full of unprocessed, highly charged, aesthetic symbolism, I quickly leave. I drive an hour home in the rain. I lay in bed awake for a while. Masina shares days later that they’d asked Chaia to play a Samoan hymn, Lota Nu’u Ua Ou Fanau Ai, during the closing activation. It’s a song that entwines love for the land, the people, and the creator into an anthem. I feel this esprit de résistance all around me as I write this. Perhaps the same spirit of the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, who could not stop dancing, even unto death. Or like Christ himself, who could not stop loving, even upon a gruesome cross. Soul Stake pierced a sonic wave into the atmosphere and my gut, and sound never disappears; just like time, it only echoes into forever. The performance, tetelestai. The exhibition goes on. And time will continue to speak.

Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space: a media movement investigating the connections between land, power, and art. She’s definitely a mom, which makes her a futurist. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

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Like encountering an optical prism, Dabin Ahn’s work is faceted and conjures movement, baiting the viewer to shift and crane their neck to see the whole picture. For the Chicago-based artist, painting is both an image and an object—a window and a presence.

I caught Dabin’s Los Angeles solo show, Golden Days at Francois Ghebaly, which closed on Valentine’s Day 2026. Walking through Golden Days felt like noticing clouds move across the sky. First glance, the work is immediately alluring, seamlessly rendered, and aesthetically beautiful. As one lingers, layers of looking drift into view. One notices the limited palette of blues, grays, earth tones, and the motifs of see-through glass, cracked vessels, candles, and fragments. Then, standing still, one discovers hidden sources of light, the craft of the trapezoid frames, or a real piece of walnut at the edge of the painted table. There are gestures of erasure, loss, and futile holding through the sanded linen, the disappearing vessels, and cavities within and around the edge. Inevitably, one remains in front of the work waiting for the candle to flicker, the vessel to collapse, the pencil to roll off the table, or the crane to escape. Associative visions unfold, and the contours of what is real and what is made-up crumble.

The conversation about what is “real” is intentionally prevalent within the work. Mixing illusory techniques—like trompe l’oeil and cast resin that imitate tree bark—with real material elements—like physical fragments of turquoise and actual beams of wood—the work seems obsessed with deconstructing, recreating, and questioning what is real.

Dabin is world-building—it is a world that cycles through itself, informing what becomes real, what stays the same, and what is reproduced.

Facts and facsimiles.

The artist disclosed that there are about four words he uses to anchor his work. The Korean word “jin shim” (진심) is one of them. “Jin shim” is one of those untranslatable words. It is made up of the compound of “jin” (진), which means true, truth, or sap (as in tree sap), and “shim” (심), which means mind or intention. Together, jin shim is meant to mean “genuine intent,” “unalloyed resolve,” “unadulterated dedication,” “total earnestness,” or “sincere to the core.” In contrast to the Korean word “jinsil” (진실), which often refers to factual truth, “jin shim” refers to the inner subjective, a true heart.

In elemental ways, Golden Days was dedicated to the artist’s father, who passed just before the show opened. Dabin shared that despite this intent, it felt like the shallow tip of an iceberg in the process of grief. Both words and images feel thin when trying to encrust or communicate the depth of losing a parent. Layered within this loss is the fact that Dabin’s father was a public figure. Dabin Ahn’s father was one of the most iconic and revered actors in Korea—Ahn Sung-ki (안성기). Ahn Sung-ki’s funeral drew a star-studded crowd, as figures like Lee Jung Jae (Squid Game), Yoo Ji-Tae (Oldboy), and Hyun Bin (Crash Landing on You), among others, were photographed mourning at the funeral ceremony. Known as “the nation’s actor” (국민배우), Ahn Sung-ki was not only known for his artistic excellence and six-decade career but also for his reputation of humility, kindness, and dignity. As Dabin shared about his grief, he remarked that while his father has an image of being a good man, “as his son, I can truthfully say that he really is.”

The image is real.

Like the fable of the velveteen rabbit, Golden Days meditates on the questions of “the real” through motifs of beauty, ephemera, decay, loss, change, and time. The works’ explorations of likeness and reproduction feel less like sleight of hand or magic tricks and more like the miracle of being loved by a good dad.

On the night of the Oscars, I spoke with Dabin about his upcoming solo show in Chicago at Document Gallery. Talking about his work, he sent me a preview of one of his paintings, which included a small screen that looped a compilation of digital clips shot by the artist. Cycles of birds, fireworks, the moon, and sky flashed within the frame.

This material expansion is nested within the conversation of mimesis, not just in relation to Dabin’s work, but also in the context of his life. The elder son of one of Korea’s most recognized actors, Dabin has an uncanny resemblance to his father. Growing up, Dabin would often watch his father on screen, enchanted by his dad’s craft and, naturally, wanted to be like him. As Dabin discussed debuting video within his work, he expressed excitement about ways he could engage his father’s lexicon of the screen, though instead of movies, he’d move through the form and frame of painting. Video captures movement, exists in duration, and inherently personifies the artist’s queries of anima, likeness, and reproduction in an expansive, iterative way.

While the work still considers Dabin’s father, the show at Document centers on themes of duration and the passing of time. Dabin shared that the rationale of placing candles in his work is the same rationale that compels him towards video. And this makes sense. Whether it’s the kinetic movements of a flame animating shadowy silhouettes in a cave or flashing lights on multiple spinning photographs to conjure a projection of a man riding a horse, light has an intimate relationship to images in the formation of a moving picture. There are multiple light sources within Dabin’s work—candles, fireflies, stars, reflections, moons—and now, he’ll add the glow of a digital screen.

Encountering Dabin’s work, one begins to consider temporal fragility, brevity of a particular light, vastness—the sky. And like looking at the sky, if you wait, you might recognize yourself moved.

Dabin Ahn’s Solo Show will open Friday, March 27, at Document Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.

The Four Seasons, Oil on linen over panel, plexiglass, single-board computer, LCD display, cables, power supply, hardware, and walnut, 18 1/2 x 13 inches, 2026. Video courtesy of Dabin Ahn.

Michelle Chun is an artist, art educator, and art writer based in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA in Painting from RISD and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School. She was a HATCH artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition, a Painting and Drawing Teaching Artist-in-residence at Lillstreet Art Center, and a Wurtele Gallery Teaching Fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery. She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island, among other exhibitions.

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Still rattled from encountering The Gun Range while walking down Percy Street, having fumbled to find an unlocked door to get into Fleisher/Ollman, I bring my anxiety into the space. As a disoriented outsider, I zoom up the elevator to the glass-enclosed cube, where, still breathless, the doors open. I flutter past the art to the back of the second room, where I’m met with the only text-based piece, “How do you draw anxiety?” Well, you’re looking right at it, I thought, referencing myself. The piece, Mr. Pickles, however, is made from a 3D-printed pen and depicts a delicate, peach-colored cartoon: a blue nose, large, tightly clenched teeth, wearing a sports jersey of a team I cannot say. The character looks caged in their feelings. On view now through March 28, 2026, Jesse Harrod’s Pet Trade at Fleisher/Ollman reveals an interior world of color, extruded imaginaries, birds in costume, and most importantly, freedom.

These paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Harrod seem to include every material except paint. Filling the two-room gallery space are small-scale, hard-edge, felt color studies, drawings produced with 3D plastic-printing pens, a series of paracord-bandaged heart-shielding amulets, and a flock of felt parrots both caged and free. Standing between room one and two, Itch Finger—I’ll call it a blue flamingo coatrack-like sculpture—feels like a bodyguard, a conductor, or a zookeeper for the birds. Its blue hand points not straight up but crooked—worn, surely calloused. Below, a multicolored hoop skirt with one found denim pant leg. It’s much taller than I, towering around 7 and a half feet.

Pet Trade gestures to the buying and selling of wild animals as companions. Embarrassingly, my first thought was Tiger King. And I gave a moment of reflection to the phase of the COVID-19 lockdown in which it seemed all of America was watching Joe Exotic’s problematic, cautionary tale. I remember the discomfort of being kept inside for months for fear of the virus and the absurd hilarity and escapism the show seemed to provide. But Pet Trade’s layers nod to a different kind of care and go far beyond this into “the affect and erotics of companionship.” Harrod has a chronic illness, has undergone many heart surgeries, and spends much of their time in interior spaces making. This context pulses beneath everything in the show.

Beside Mr. Pickles hangs a series of seven amulet paracord works. Described in the press release as Rorschach charts, I’ll admit, I can’t not see Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Iris III when viewing Harrod’s Protection from Error, Artery & Root. However, the history of looking at O'Keeffe's flowers tells us more about critics than about paintings, and Harrod's amulets seem to know this. The smooth woodgrain ovals act like portrait frames. Yet they’re shields. It’s a tightly tethered multi-colored cord: a mask, a web, a gate, a patch, a scar. As if a spider tediously spun something wonderfully whole. Or a lucha fighter laces its mask and enters the ring. Or a drag performer adorns their face with blush. Against Slow Harm, A Protection for Holes & Heat, Against Foolish Replies & Soft Catastrophes: each spell reveals a new vulnerability and invokes a new power.

Not to be compared with Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, these pieces are protections of bodies, rather than portraits of a specific kind of body. Their ambiguity is an armor. Paracord is a survival material—military-grade, neon-colored, bought from prepper shops—first encountered by Harrod during a difficult season teaching in Virginia. Contorted into the practice of macramé, the material shape shifts into a new thing, revealing both its strength, hold, and malleability. It both constrains and holds, wraps and squeezes. It stretches just enough until taut.

Oriented above, there are eleven felted, glamorously sequined, bedazzled parrots. Not unlike Polly Apfelbaum’s “fallen paintings,” which were hung on the floor to collapse hierarchies, I’d like to dub these birds, if I can be so bold, “risen sculptures.” One must look up to see. I gaze at the peeling ceiling; something about it feels like a perfect environment for these feathered creatures. Some of the birds are free, all unique beauties. What colors! Some of the birds are caged, though if they tried even a little, they’d escape the wide bars made of thin wire, papier-mache, and plastic. The parrots all have Irish names: Eamon, Declan, Ewan, Ronan, Seamus, Conor. Flocked together, the free birds are a chosen family. Rowan, Rory, Virgil, Riordain, Rogan, sit perched, watching the people below—only me. Apparently, I was the first guest they’d had all day.

After praising the birds for some time, I slowly walk back toward the front room. Once more, I’m swept into a new material Harrod wields skillfully: 3D printed pen drawings. This material technique has almost no fine art precedent that I’m aware of—Charles Hickey's sold-out booth at Felix this year is the only other place I've seen the medium taken seriously. Yet, where Hickey’s paintings are denser, more opaque plastic, Harrod’s use of the material reflects the fragility of a body. Like brittle rainbow bones, these drawings look like they could be blown off the wall with a strong enough breeze. Incoming, a sketch of a multicolored city scene, and red rampart castle walls, pushing back—or being invaded by—a black and blue, cloudy dark force. Two purple shadows with crows perched on their shoulders lurk. It feels like doom is coming. In Bugdies, it seems we’re now inside one of the castle walls, and there are some parrots squished together, a pink eye overhead, and the crows surveil at every angle. I’m not sure if the parrots are trapped or taking shelter.

Honestly, the only oddball in the entire show is Sit Pretty, a drawing of various chairs: lawn chairs, a stool, a Bertoia-style wire chair, a wingback armchair—Old money. Ha, but then I think this, too, is a collapsed hierarchy: rich man, poor man chairs. Everyone’s got a seat at Harrod’s table. Every class, every era, every art form is here. They’re all seats, all empty, all waiting for a body. Nobody matches, but everybody belongs. With eight plastic drawings displayed in this first room, Harrod builds an entire world without a single brushstroke. And yet, the painters provoke us to this day with their ghosts. Oh, how they haunt!

I had an encounter once with Green Blue Red by Ellsworth Kelly at The Broad Museum, where it ate me whole. Its sheer size was likely the reason, but I stood there for a moment and lost my body. In Pet Trade, I find my body staring at Harrod’s seven felt studies of pure abstraction, color, and material. Did the parrots come before or after these works? I wonder. These little intimacies are the reason I love to gaze upon art. The hard-edge painters of the 60s and 70s knew that the body has this irresistible thing for color. Harrod surely knows this, too, because the sequencing color leads you through the entire exhibition, spins you around, and stands you back up again. As I stare, the simplified color, shape, form grows and grows and grows. The colors are the continuity. The colors are the reason I feel alive. “In order to become oriented, you might suppose that we must first experience disorientation,” said Sara Ahmed in her book Queer Phenomenology. I’d entered this show in complete bewilderment by the sound of many gunshots. I’d left feeling a bit lighter, regulated, and full of color.

Emily Logan is an art writer and publicist currently based in the deep suburbs of Philadelphia. She’s been running Space On Space since 2020. It’s an art magazine and PR project she’s still trying to figure out. The project’s mission is to promote non-violence, environmental stewardship, and belonging. She’s definitely a mom, which makes her a futurist. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

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Carriers is an important show of the moment, specifically for its lack of resolve. An exhibition currently on view at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia, now through March 14, 2026, Carriers references and fragments, leaving the viewer in a balancing act attempting to measure the weight of stolen cultural memories and cultural displacement on the same plane as fragmented pixel resolution. I love the works of these three artists individually, but the curatorial choice to invite the three to share space led to deeper digging.

This group show, based on an open call, includes paintings by Mary Laube and Brianna Howard, and a 3-minute looped video installation by Andrew Ina. The title nods to someone or something that transports goods, people, and information. A carrier is a vessel, a medium, a body in transit. Organized around the fragmentation of personal and cultural memory, the works address the way things are lost, altered, and partially recovered in transmission across time and borders.

Ina’s installation, which includes personal archive images of family with found images, attempts the impossible by tracing memory and archives that do not exist in their completion. He does so with a consistent feeling of grief and loss. As a whole, Ina’s art practice interweaves found, autoethnographic, and archival materials to reflect on cross-generational survival within the SWANA diaspora. According to the SWANA Alliance website, SWANA is a decolonial word for the South West Asian/North African region in place of terms like Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, Arab World, or Islamic World.

Architected into the alcove of the gallery, Ina’s video installation includes a white panel protruding perpendicularly, hovering off the ground, like a window or a sign. Projected onto the square plane is an animated dance of cut-out photographs, a man posing with Bob’s Big Boy–a fixture of postwar American suburban life, a horse, a blurred map of the island country Cyprus,* a barren landscape. This mixed-media animation is astoundingly hypnotizing. I stare and stare, never really knowing fully what I’m seeing. Jutting behind is a tabletop-like panel with a video projection coming down from above that oscillates between water and pixels continuously. This serene screen forces the viewer to look down upon it, an unusual feeling when viewing art.

To the right of Ina’s work is a painting by Howard, Signals in Blue Distance. Immediately, a connection is made between Ina’s water reflection turned pixel with Howard’s way with paint that resonates like sound and pixel. Where Ina’s audio is a mix of ambient noises, water, and insect sounds that chirp in and out of frequency, Howard’s many, many dots accumulate like cells dividing, or like the manual labor of a beaver slowly, painstakingly building a dam. Howard’s analog layering is intuitive, like a flawless user interface. And Ina’s audio brings Howard and Laube’s paintings to life, as if they’re buzzing. It’s here where the conversation begins between Howard and Laube. Their paintings talk back and forth around the room, pushing and pulling the viewer through the show.

However, there’s a tension around the curatorial decision to include Howard’s work in this show. Artworks based on lost cultural memory are the kinds of works, particularly Ina’s, that are grieving in a way. I worry that there might be a contested imbalance in weight across the types of fragmentation we are discussing in Carriers. In Seph Rodney’s 2021 Hyperallergic essay, “On Grieving and Mourning with Art,” he wrestles with a similar tension as he compares two very different shows that portray Black grief. Rodney questioned the authenticity of the grief in works like Rashid Johnson’s “Antoine’s Organ” presented in Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, to “a kind of emotional earnestness” in a much smaller, less star-studded show, On Protest and Mourning mounted online by the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI). I wondered if Howard’s paintings about a more abstract fragmentation might dilute the heft and theft of loss in both Ina and Laube’s pieces.

I’m not mad Howard is included, just curious. After recently seeing footage on social media of an air strike on Tehran’s telecommunication site, a bright blue flash of light exploding–different than the grey, black, red explosion of buildings–I think of Howard’s paintings. When I saw this video–a video I cannot retrace when re-scrolling through my feed history–it was then that I surrendered to the tensions this show holds. Howard’s work has a continuity across all paintings that reads simultaneously as TV static, a photo too zoomed in becoming pixels, and maybe even an electrical explosion. But it’s paint.

In a Post-Internet society where our lives are as much, or more so, online than in the physical world, what happens if all of that disappears, as it can in war zones? In the weeks since Carriers opened, the U.S. and Israel began conducting their joint attack on Iran. And Iran is SWANA. Already, there’s been major damage to cultural landmarks like The Golestan Palace. When telecommunication is wiped out by weapons of destruction, how does one communicate? The war never leaves my mind as I meditate on the work in this show.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers, the painting by Laube to the right of Signals in Blue Distance, is the title of one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems. It’s a poem I’ve carried with me for many years now, having received a card with the poem on the cover. I pin it to the corkboard above my desk and look at it when I need to stare into space. Dickinson’s work’s hauntingly personal voice resounds despite having only published about 10 out of 1,800 poems while she was alive. If you peek even a little bit into the dispute around what Dickinson’s wishes were for how the works should be published, you can see the parallel here in Carriers. Not unlike the fragmented and edited histories of the SWANA diaspora, Dickinson’s poems were published and edited in varying ways, sparking debate over her true intentions.

And still I wonder about Laube’s use of a Euro-American poet within her work, as an artist born in South Korea, currently based in the U.S., whose work is a bold reclamation of agency and privacy. It seems she, too, is welcoming this tension I felt earlier. Looking into Laube’s exhibition history, I was struck by the exhibition text for a Korean American Artist Collective group show titled BULLPEN, which states,

“Curating a show on the basis of identity requires an understanding of what it is—and to define it, is to confine it. Here we come across the first landmine (representation is a dangerous business so it’s useful to have a trusty, mine-sniffing rat by your side). When you are born othered, you have no choice but to define yourself with, or against, the language of the oppressor.”

Rather than constricting identity, Carriers remains broad. It’s this very entanglement that is our complex world, which makes Carriers both potent, dangerous, and precarious. And preservation is a precarious kind of truth-telling. This work by Laube is the only one of hers within the show that has no figurative element: no hand, eye, or hair. It frustrates. I stood before it, frustrated by its confident abstraction, until I realized Laube’s power over me. This is her exact point. I’m not allowed to see her unless she lets me in. Which she generously does. And the viewer’s body becomes a kind of carrier as it floats through the show, subconsciously receiving the message it needs from each work. Like the fragility of a messenger pigeon flying from point A to point B, I view the remainder of the works. Once a very analog way to communicate, a homing pigeon could become the most secure mode of communication in a society of mass government surveillance and capital warfare.

Is erasure, erasure, regardless of individual or ethnic cultural pain? Dickinson’s insertion in the show provokes this question. There is power and agency in self-protection and the refusal to be simplified or confined. I’d been questioning the curatorial decision of including Howard in a show with two artists whose work wrestles with cultural visibility and memory, but these Dickinson poems allow me to finally see a through line. Laube’s work pushes and pulls the viewer simultaneously. It’s about the friction we feel when we can’t know. The choice to remain mysterious and not unveil oneself is agency. Her colors are equally alluring and opaque, both a window and a wall.

A Sweeter Rose a Softer Sky reads like a desperate wish for a freer, more peaceful world. It becomes her own kind of Renaissance altarpiece. Taking the structure of Western devotional authority, Laube puts something else in the center. And Tibetan thangkas and Buddhist mandalas are also inserted, yet collapsed. This work is doing what Laube states she wants to do in her work: reconfigure objects from different national, political, and religious traditions into synthesized forms that become flattened, off-kilter, and unnamable. A figure’s hair is ornately decorated in flowers, and hands pull back a curtain to reveal a rectangular block of colors: no face, no figure, no identity. Laube will not be anyone’s puppet; she is her own master in these painted worlds.

Faded Blossoms Fresh When Worn becomes Laube’s most vulnerable work. It’s the most revealing; the figure is almost glaring, and not at us, but past us. Eyes, tightly manicured brow, lush, black, blue hair combed, and a fan, creating an imagined breeze, the blow of a resolute spirit. This blue in the hair is the same in Ina’s projection. It’s the same blue I saw online–the electrical explosion–the many tiny dots in Howard’s works; it’s fragmented throughout. This blue is ocean that divides, separates, sometimes protects, sometimes drowns, and also carries. It’s blue–the computer screen–binary discourse that only serves to further fragment. It’s a blue sky, sadness, the air we share, the way the bird moves, carrying the message in both song and letter. It’s in the ink of a pen quill tracing the past from beginning to end.

*Andrew Ina later tells me that the map of Cyprus depicted was a map of the proposed 1919 colonial mandates by the United States, following the Balfour Declaration. It shows modern day Lebanon falling under French control.

Towering at over 8-feet tall, the thin-legged Smiley Face Cocker Spaniel w/ 200 Eyes, is first to engage from across the room, presenting itself as tall, strong, and handsome. What looks like wings tacked to the corners of the frame is an ornate embellishment to a four-square charcoal and colored pencil Miró-like drawing. Walking closer, its backside is reflected in the FJORD window, naked bottom abstracted in black square, yellow square, and muted red rectangle. Turn the corner, a new perspective. I see a small tail, or an eyelash surprise.

Looking back at the entrance now, Googley Eyes 2 peeks between the legs of the spaniel. A defenseless cartoon gesture, made of resin and cement, looks surprised while the 200 eyes surveil. To the left, Descending Lenses breaks the googly gaze and points and shoots. A tripod stance, this work is made up of steel, resin, dye, concrete, plexiglass, and dust. Operating at times as a kind of makeshift orrery, the almost scientific device casts reflective shapes on the white wall, invoking ghosts or shadow puppets—we don’t know. We’re now in space, it seems Mercury is certainly in retrograde because Pebble Hitting Glass, though the smallest work in the show, gives context and a moment of realism: a broken car windshield.

Paired with an uninvited guest, Pebble Hitting Glass poses with an actual small-legged spider; an arachnid pebble in motion. Within the frame, an X forms where a pink and a blue line intersect, with a yellow splotch presumably marking where the pebble hit. The drawing pinned to the cement frame, as if thumb-tacked onto a bulletin board, like an investigation of a crime scene or an accident.

Across the way, the birds, like many feathered Mona-Lisas, but plastic, and not so beautiful, are roosting. I-70 joins eagle with morning dove and god-forsaken pigeon of the streets. Vulture looks down on woodpecker; the animal hierarchy dismantled, a dysfunctional parliament forced together in an uncomfortable family portrait. The glorified violence of raptors meets the everyday hustle of street birds. The drip is not bird shit, but melted wax on a caustic, plasmacut altar, or fireplace mantle: a funeral for the beloved Western portrait. Hill describes this work as his “version of the ‘great’ American landscape” on Instagram. A road sign, “a boxy car,” colored panels, a sunset, just brilliant multicolored scribbles. I think of Cy Twombly’s series Fifty Days at Iliam at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a few miles away. I always think of Cy Twombly.

Hill brings forth Emotion, capital E, like Twombly. Twombly leads the way around the room—perhaps the ghost Descending Lenses is channelling—often present in Hill’s drawings. Erasure, in drawing, is frequently more evocative than disclosure. And not unlike the erasure of Twombly’s queer identity during his lifetime, Hill’s work deals directly and indirectly with visibility, perception, and surveillance of the queer body in space. Smiley Face Cocker Spaniel has legs to stand on, but Total Smoke Show is a portrait whose weight is framed, and the vacuum hose drags. In Joseph Henry’s 2017 essay “Queering Queer Abstraction” in The Brooklyn Rail, he uses the phrase “joyous illegibility” when describing the eye’s inability to make sense of queer abstraction. And joyous is how I feel looking at these works that both blush and dance before the viewer, concealing and revealing themselves simultaneously, like a coy performer or a flirtation.

Most concealed of all the works, Bolt from the Blue is the exhibition's purely kinetic drawing. Crisp edges, the glossy steel frame is lifting all the weight here. At first glance: shattered glass, or birds, or—no—more Miró-like constellations, this time on a vivid cobalt background. Marks dart and slash in greens, reds, blacks, and pinks, creating the sensation of a sky teeming with invisible forces made suddenly visible. A bolt holds objects together, also refers to a sudden movement or dash, as well as a flash of lightning. The blue sucks you in to stay a while.

Also very blue, that hose. The protagonist, Total Smoke Show, seems to reference both a dancer grooving past midnight through a window and a car body. Declaring itself “hot,” this assemblage frames desire on its own terms. The attachment of the hose is flawless, and it’s far-reaching (96 inches long to be exact). The welds resemble hair in a sense, tufted, but manicured to a T. Permanently adhered to the metal square, unless one chooses to use an angle grinder. But within the rigid square, things get interesting. I see a breast. Perhaps arms flail, or swing up and down rapidly, a torso, belly button, and scratch-like marks feel like prickly chest hair. Four square panels of various shades: red, brown, pink, and cream, feel like mixed emotions, fear, anger, seasickness, and beet-red embarrassment. What on earth is on top? Walking closer, it’s an exhaust pipe, brand: UPower. Together, a vacuum and an exhaust pipe: suck and blow simultaneously, a closed loop system.

If all art is poetry begging to be read, this is certainly the case in Diorama of a Sunrise Setting. The title haunts me with its lack of resolve. There’s an impossibility within it: a sunrise does not set, and up cannot be down. William J. Simmons’ book Queer Formalism: The Return offers language for this kind of refusal to behave: “I think queer formalism is not a style or a movement, but a necessary and reckless and activist and reclusive and informed and blithe state of free association that springs forth from the simultaneous love and skepticism that nonnormative bodies cultivate in order to survive.” Hill’s work is all these things and more.

Christ weeping blood in Gethsemane (the garden’s name meaning oil press in Hebrew) is the exhibition title’s reference. There is a weight of grief present in the space, but what a lofty subject. To weep blood, or Hematidrosis, is a rare condition where extreme emotional stress can produce tears with red vital fluid. When Christ wept blood, the man embodied the beginning of a physical transformation: a body being pressed; an olive just before oil pours out; on the verge of decay, awaiting future exaltation. Strong’s work is a portrait of that in-between moment of ache.

Sparse and meek, Gallery 1 acts as a peculiar stations of the cross, or Way of Sorrows. It includes wall hangings, sculptures (some sitting directly on the ground, others on makeshift pedestals), and a plank bench supported by tree stumps. The stump’s bark still hosts living bracket fungi—turkey tails—quietly insisting that decay and growth can occur within one body. A hare and a beast—two small talisman-like objects sitting on the floor—are unvarnished and easily held in the hand, looking to be rubbed more than admired. A small sculptural assembly gathers: an alien-like thatched body with four carved stick legs and a t-shaped face, a horned or thorned animal, and an octopus-haired bust with a white painted face sitting on a French bistro-style side table. I learn later that the last piece is St. Hildegard Von Bingen receiving the holy spirit.

Receiving, a posture Strong’s work holds well, is most evident in his paintings made without touch. It’s a process that, as Strong tells me, he has iterated upon for nearly twenty years, has tried to divert from, but feels "haunted and weirdly bound by.” Strong’s “recordings” involve nurturing film layers of pigment through evaporation, which records information from various surfaces and transfers those layers to canvas or wood. Imagine cultivation ponds in his clothing drawers, in the attic, or in the woods where animals walk through them, and in the winter, they freeze. The results look like fossil feathers, or the softest wings pressed between pages. Like the inner work of meditation, the lack of doing is doing the undoing within: a sanctification of sorts. The paintings are mysterious, and that makes them inviting; we don’t know, and we don’t need to, but we believe in the work. Carved ears appear over and over again: a call to listen rather than speak. The bench is given for sitting, so we sit. The work’s simplicity is its majesty.

Gallery 2 is the chapel. It includes six more benches, a menagerie of animal sculptures: a donkey, a sheep, and two mice, and a carved bust of the controversial early Quaker James Nayler. Elsewhere, a shelf adorned with printed cards and ephemera accumulated in small devotional clusters: praying hands, reproductions of reliquaries, a butterfly, a clay tile stamped with the word "PEACE," a small booklet titled When a Loved One Dies by Suicide: Comfort, Hope, and Healing for Grieving Catholics. These vignettes feel less curated than gathered, the way a bedside table accumulates the objects of a difficult season. The main distraction that breaks an otherwise meaningful experience is the red-streaked, plastic-lined translucent windows. Given the Catholic Church’s deep history in mosaic glass, it felt like a missed opportunity. Though creating a calm, darkroom glow, the drippy red window treatment felt a bit more haunted house than handcrafted chapel.

There is also, throughout, a persistent strangeness that keeps the work from tipping into sentimentality. The ears on the painting frames. The fungi growing on the sculptures. The inclusion of a sculpture of Nayler, who had been imprisoned and charged with blasphemy. The fact that at the opening, Strong reportedly wore only one shoe, played violin while pouring visitors violet wine, a beverage inspired by Hildegard of Bingen's medieval remedy for melancholy.

What makes Agony in the Garden more than an exercise in Christian mystical aesthetics is its nonsensical sensibilities. This is an artist for whom the mystical and the absurd are not opposed but continuous. There’s a refusal here to treat sacred content as precious or unapproachable, but also not laughable. There’s no outright mockery of it either. Strong's sincerity is not naive; it is honest, inclusive, and communal. The evident labor of the handmade, the unvarnished vulnerability of placing grief texts in plain sight, and the extension of the exhibition into a calendar of public programming. The gallery becomes, for six weeks, an actual site of pastoral care. In a contemporary art context that tends to hold religion at a careful, critical distance, this is a genuinely radical gesture.

A quick Google Trends search of the word “slop” charts a rapid increase in usage from mid-2024, peaking in December 2025. Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year. First used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, the definition has since evolved to describe digital content of low quality, usually generated in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. But slop has an older, bodily meaning too: unappetizing, watery food. Something you’re forced to consume. Something that consumes you.

Before viewing the exhibition, I’d anticipated a more overstimulating experience given the title, but was surprised by the hypnotic, almost grounding quality of CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED at Vox Populi, currently on view through February 15, 2026. Artist collective BLACKnet comes together in a true collision of worlds—a three-channel video installation by Zante Moore, Shori “Halie” Sims, and Logan Crompton, curated by Ollie Goss.

Flashing light almost blinds you as you enter the dark room, where two benches sit parallel to the center projection. At first I stare straight ahead from the middle of the room. I rotate my head from side to side, trying to make sense of the triple-projection experience. I finally sit down and settle into letting the work wash over me. The piece runs nine minutes and twenty-four seconds. I was short on time—my parking meter would be up in fifteen minutes—but I sat for the piece one and a half times through.

For taking on the aesthetics of a video game, the graphics are more serene than expected, too. I see no violence. The word “chopped” is in the title, but I see no physical knives out. The word “screw” is used, but other than bodies thrusting into the void and low-pixel skins, it’s not explicit. The thrusting almost seems to pulse like a ticking metronome keeping time. The piece is guided by the audio.

After some research, I realize the title itself is an homage and a mutation. “Chopped and screwed” is the hip-hop remixing technique pioneered by the late Houston DJ Screw in the early 1990s, slowing the tempo of a track to a syrupy crawl, then cutting and skipping beats to produce something heavy, hypnotic, and irreversibly altered. BLACKnet applies that logic to the work’s audio and video. Where DJ Screw screwed the beat, BLACKnet screws the pixel, the avatar, the chatroom, the background music. And the addition of “slopped” wedged between the chop and the screw signals something messier, more deliberate.

As someone who doesn’t play video games or know much about Lil’ Kim other than her iconic Lady Marmalade, here’s what I saw and heard. The installation cycles through registers with disorienting ease. One moment, a room-browser interface fills the projection wall: “Featured Rooms,” “Recents,” the lobby architecture of IMVU rendered monumental by scale. Avatars drift through saturated landscapes where texture refuses realism: oversized sunflowers planted in grassy patches, a purple knitted tower rises against a foreboding red sky, and a winged figure blooms into a blown-out halo of white light, simultaneously angelic and overexposed. Old internet aesthetics are strong. Suddenly, the image snaps into low-resolution club theatrics: bodies jitter, clip, and collide in hot magenta light. Shori “Halie” Sims serves up what the press release aptly calls “PS2 Lil’ Kim realness,” avatars that channel the rapper’s unapologetic, hypersexualized visual language through the chunky polygons and limited texture maps of early-2000s gaming hardware. Audio harvested from late-night IMVU chatrooms, courtesy of Logan Crompton, bleeds through at the end of the video: “I’ve been listening the whole time,” a speaker declares, again and again. “Stop fucking playing me, bitch.” It’s a private argument broadcast at gallery scale. It’s also an unknowable dialogue, opaque to an outsider.

BLACKnet describes itself as “post internet and meme concerned,” meaning the internet isn't a place you visit but a condition you live inside, one that shapes us. Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism and The Black Meme push this idea further, articulating how that condition is racialized, how Black images in particular get copied, compressed, and commodified through circulation. BLACKnet doesn't stage virtual worlds as escapism. It stages the conditions under which identity gets built, performed, and valued. The seams stay visible throughout—blur, blown highlights, jagged edges, mismatched textures—and rather than clean up the roughness, the work lets it stand. Hito Steyerl called this kind of degraded, well-traveled image a “poor image.” The avatars in CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED are worn on purpose, made to look like they’ve already traveled through a hundred platforms before arriving on this wall.

Zante’s work has been described as a “digital triptych,” a frame that fits here too. What happens if slop is slowed down and split into three panels? It feels precious despite the low-quality graphics. Triptychs historically were a devotional format: hinged altarpieces where the central image held the sacred subject and the side panels provided context. The viewer’s eye moved laterally while understanding that meaning emerged from the relationship between the three. That logic maps directly onto a three-channel video installation: you can’t absorb all three projections at once, so you choose where to look, catch something in peripheral vision, and accept that you’re always missing part of the piece. Yet unlike a medieval altarpiece, you’re watching an avatar thrust into a void. The format also resists the single-screen logic of scrolling. A TikTok or Instagram feed gives you one image at a time, sequentially, infinitely. A triptych gives you three images at once, finitely. It demands presence rather than consumption. That feels deliberate; the form itself slows you down.

In a recent interview with Sixty Inches From Center about their show IJBOL Fields, Zante describes their work as a meme as mourning, a meme heaven, or meme graveyard. BLACKnet’s installation feels, to me, like a funeral for the graphics of an early internet era. The press release poses the question plainly: in an “attention driven economy” where Black images are commodified, what does it mean for artists to reclaim and superimpose themselves in both digital and IRL space? I won’t pretend to answer that question from my vantage point, but the work makes it feel urgent.

My brain tries to make sense of slop—the overconsumption of information, the endless scroll—but the slop declares itself unknowable. The video slowly fades, and the glowing avatar recedes into the landscape like a comet dissolving into deeper space. And then it loops. What makes CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED land is its embrace of what BLACKnet calls “everythingism,” a willingness to let contradiction ooze: cute and abject, sacred and trash, intimate and public. In a moment when slop floods our timelines, BLACKnet generates its own slop: slowed down, mournful, haunting, and resonant. I leave the exhibition feeling humbled at what I don’t know about the work, a quality I love in any memorable piece.

Early Thursday afternoon, arriving much too early for the inaugural ATRIUM art fair, I somehow talked my way into di Rosa San Francisco before it officially opened. Inside di Rosa was an exhibition by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, layered tree rings tracing stories of human time. It was my first time at any di Rosa, coming just a day after news that they were putting their 217-acre Napa campus up for sale for $10.9 million to shore up finances and safeguard its renowned collection of Northern California art. Later that day, Shlain warmly introduced herself, then looked askance when I mentioned my premature peek. There had been a hard dictate, it turned out: no early entry. The realization landed belatedly, and a little hot. My first blush at the threshold of ATRIUM.

Late Monday night, the curling, coiled steel cables of the Bay Bridge swooped me into San Francisco for its annual art week, a flourish of openings, parties, performances, talks, and art fairs, all huddling around the fiscal warmth of FOG Design+Art, a smallish but blue-chippish international art fair launched in 2014 and held at the Fort Mason Center, Pier 2 and 3.

A few days before my arrival, the president of the California College of the Arts announced the last private, nonprofit art college in the Bay was shuttering after 120 years, preceded in death by the august and beloved San Francisco Art Institute back in 2022. CCA isn’t exactly dying the way SFAI did, but rather being purchased by Vanderbilt University in the same way that local Mills College was inhaled to become the westernmost campus of Northeastern University. The Wattis Institute will remain for now, but everyone else who works there—artists, critics, technicians, support staff—is mostly expecting to be turfed out. And all this not long after the closure of many beloved galleries, including Altman Siegel, one of the very best in the Bay, and steps away from di Rosa SF.

With the SF doom loop allegedly all looped out by the hot flush of AI money and the cheerful boosterism of Mayor Daniel Lurie of the billionaire Levi Strauss & Co. dynasty, this news stutters the civic exuberance. Announcing CCA’s closure right before art week felt—well, a little cruel. There are two emerging disruptophile, boutique alternatives for the future of art education in the Bay: non-degree-granting apprenticeship/residency programs, one called Art + Water in Fort Mason, spearheaded by author Dave Eggers, and another from heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, built on the bones of SFAI. Even with these green shoots, a forest is still being clear-cut. The ecology necessary to sustain a healthy art world—museums, nonprofits, commercial galleries, schools, and art criticism—just lost another of its fundamentals.

This is the soil that ATRIUM is growing out of.

After my own labor for the week—an exhibition I helped curate for the Shack15 Art Award—and having passed other fanfares and art fairs, I arrived early for ATRIUM at the Minnesota Street Project.

Founded in 2016 by collectors and philanthropists Andy and Deborah Rappaport in response to catastrophic real-estate pressure on the Bay art scene, Minnesota Street Project is a rather large, privately initiated arts complex in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, cinching commercial galleries, artist studios, and nonprofits together across a cluster of buildings. The Dogpatch feels like one of those post-industrial schemes where old factories and warehouses are converted into tech office space, plugged here and there with condos. Wryness aside, I am actually and genuinely grateful that one of the Bay overlords did something substantively civic to help a pummeled art world survive here.

Organized by MSP with gallerist Eleanor Harwood leading the selection committee alongside Aaron Harbour of Et al. and MSP's Jonathan Runcio, ATRIUM is a new Bay-focused art fair staged across MSP's campus. Free and open to the public, it was conceived as a local, low-barrier, and wildly more democratic alternative to FOG's international blue chip model, using MSP's existing infrastructure to fold temporary fair booths into the site's year-round galleries, nonprofits, and artist studios.

Past a sushi truck and a petite café, MSP opens into its large central atrium where the fair unfolds, flanked on two stories by the regular galleries that live there. Art-fair booths stretch down that atrium, more snug than the usual, but somehow sweeter. Tacked onto both the resident and visiting galleries is a kind of sub-fair of artist-run spaces in one of the larger, winding upstairs corner galleries, with a skylight. Following the naming conventions of ATRIUM, this has been dubbed Skylight Above. The model, strikingly summoned from its open-space architecture, folded gently and easily into the existing framework, an amendment that allowed many not based at MSP into one shared space.

Alongside the 13 MSP exhibition spaces were another 24 visiting galleries and 13 artist-run projects for Skylight Above. Of these 50, six came from outside the Bay: one from Cambria, one from Santa Barbara, and four from Los Angeles.

It was a resolutely locavore affair, with a half dozen invitees from down the coast. I use locavore thoughtfully. ATRIUM has the approachability and pleasure of a local food festival, a Taste of San Francisco. The flicker and buzz, the friends well met crowding the narrow aisles. The gallerists aflutter in the booths, with paintings and sundry wall works both well hung and also more casually leaning against the walls on the ground.

While circling MSP’s campus, I saw the quilted billows in the cavernous MSP Foundation space by mother-son artist collaboration May and Mik Gaspay, silhouettes of the boats that carried their family displaced from Vietnam. At Eleanor Harwood, I spotted huddled socks and camouflaged constructions drawn from the everyday of the artist, snapshotted and sculpted by Lee Materazzi.

Together, these works shared a seriousness scaled to the human, attentive rather than spectacular, confident without theatrics.

Art isn't cheap per se, but many of the price sheets I peeked at felt downright achievable. Modest enough for this penniless poet to nearly blow $400 at Bass & Reiner on gorgeous reworked stereographs by Sally Scopa. Those double-imaged cards you'd slip into a stereoscope for a three-dimensional image, in Scopa's hands, become subtle, lyrically cosmic abstractions. Each retains the structure of the card and its markings, which in a handful contain descriptions like terse poems of lost—or perhaps re-dreamt—pictures: "84. Jungfrau of the Swiss Alps," "Winter, Landscape," "101 An Approaching Storm on Lake Erie," and "92. Watering Mama's Flowers." Critics can’t buy a thing and then write about it, so fortunately for this story—though unhappily for me—they were all sold out before ATRIUM’s official opening.

Down in the booths, at Cruise Control Contemporary from Cambria, Arthur Wechsler’s houses, islands, and sassy cats wear their soft, brushy hues like a kind of naïve honesty, though their affect is sweet, gentle, resolute, and unmistakably human. Electric Works had a salon-style hang of witty, Raymond Pettibon-ish works on paper by Dave Eggers, with the profits going to help jump-start Art + Water.

Upstairs in Skylight Above, with spaces invited and curated by Jonathan Runcio, the presentations refreshingly lacked booth partitions. Like Post-Fair in Los Angeles or certain incarnations of Sunday in London, it felt airy and open, and though each space had its own territory, the lack of wall demarcation made the whole thing more convivial. At Your Mood Projects, I lingered with artist Chris Johanson, learning about the shapely, modular, whimsical silhouettes of Lanford Weingrod, a retired pediatrician who developed their voice through decades of continuing education art classes at SFAI. Sidebitch’s presentation, visiting from Los Angeles, was gorgeous: a slick pink wall rising out of a green pool, with pink and sky-blue shelves holding a flamboyance of more petite works. On the walls, Chihiro Suzuki Hashimoto’s lush Pissing Contest II—piss squirting over dappled leaves—alongside Nick Aguayo’s spotfully angled abstraction. On the shelves, gently bendy clay figurines by Jose Joaquin Figueroa, a shimmering, plump ceramic strawberry by Kim Kyne Cohen, amongst many others. Altogether, a lovely frame for a delightful plenitude of artworks.

At FOG, I’d wandered through the familiar choreography: blue-chip names, five-figure price tags, gallerists in dark suits, artworks clearly framed as domestic objects and investments for the wealthy. Classy, sure, but transactional in that particular way international fairs are. ATRIUM felt different. Part food fair, part flea market, but also really and truly an art fair—approachable, but still totally serious and very good. Not a local pond grown stagnant without circulation, but a spirit and style that felt largely of a place. I saw and felt the Bay there.

International art fairs have their necessity and charm—the sheer force of talent, history, and variety of the international art world. Still, I may like the mode and method of ATRIUM better—not as a replacement, but as a homier way of supporting art, largely but not exclusively through the sale of art objects. ATRIUM is lovable.

With so many institutions and galleries falling and flailing under the pressures of affordability, understanding the conditions of art in San Francisco isn’t just a local report, but in truth, like much else of what this place makes—it’s a preview of the future. Those reworked stereographs by Sally Scopa held their double images: this obsolescent technology with one picture layered over another, both visible, neither quite resolving into three dimensions without the device. ATRIUM felt like that—a doubled image of what the art world has been and what it might become. We are in the aftermath of techno-capitalism, trying to find a way forward. This is one solution. Not localized stagnation, not a replacement for the international circuit, but homegrown, lovable. We are at a threshold of something different. A taste of San Francisco. A taste of what’s to come.

Andrew Berardini is a writer out of Los Angeles. He’s the co-founder and editor-in-chief of ArtBae.

Learn more about his work here: andrewberardini.com

Upon entering the small gallery, eyes lock with Anna Correll’s Happy Mother’s Day with Tongue, a charcoal-and-oil-pastel painting. Two hands hold what appears to be a large card–or a magazine–over another figure’s face. The eyes and mouth are drawn on the paper; a hidden figure’s tongue pushes through a hole; the top edge reads “Mother’s.” The imagery feels like a memory or a dream, but not one that’s approachable to an outsider looking in. Ambiguously loud, the painting's lack of context becomes the point.

On the floor, Rachel Hsu’s Love, If We Can Stand It, a participatory work made out of black and white river stones and concrete, invites guests to step on the art, but shoes must be removed. The surface composes the Chinese character 忍 (to endure, bear, tolerate, or restrain), built from 刃 (blade) and 心 (heart). The work asks: how do we dispel numbness and better sink into the weight of our living? Hsu redirects attention from looking to bearing weight.

Sydney Vize’s two wax-covered board pieces feel like nostalgic mourning. Grief’s discomfort knocks. Inherited handkerchief is a light mustard yellow, the size of an actual handkerchief, with three small rectangular woven beads preserved in wax. It’s giving embalming fluid meets a handmade love letter. Unpleasant analogy is a muted red work with wax layered over a rectangle cross-stitch pattern. It simultaneously reads as a patch, wound dressing, and pixel-grid. Two dark stitches in parallel read like a stutter, or a censored word.

Noorann Matties’s Passenger Feet Curtain is meticulous: a three-foot-wide wall hanging made of pony beads that refuses full legibility. An image seemingly banal is made holy through the precious labor of the artist’s handiwork. It appears to be a film negative, noted because of the legibility of the exposure number in the bottom corner. Within the beaded photograph, an abstract figure’s legs lounge on a car dashboard overlooking a blue sliver and perhaps some city ruins–or a suburban neighborhood–who can tell. The figure’s wearing ochre pants with presumably cozy wool socks; it seems to be a sunny day. The beads behave like pixels–something we’re all too familiar with–but the beads are beads. Its lack of visual clarity and the gentle sway that comes from a wall hanging suspended in the air feel fresh.

A few other anchoring works include Humphrey’s Field [convergence ritual] by Ariana Martinez, a very quiet artwork, which nearly blends in with the white wall. Made of embossed cotton paper, its restraint creates tension of its own: it summons slower looking. Among algorithmic overstimulation and scroll slop, a quiet piece feels loud. Similarly, the two sketches by Rebecca Arp, Shape Study and Color Study (Blossom), mirror this invitation.

Natessa Amin’s three small square acrylic and paint medium artworks hypnotize: In Between Breath, The Veil is Thin, and Threshold. Like three mystic sisters, the works are clearly related, each carrying her own temperament and role. They harmonize like sirens—come closer—offering brightness without comfort and a sense of passage without arrival. Pattern and repetition are not treated as decoration, but as an opening, a portal.

The most arresting work in the show, Memories Don’t Leave Like People Do, by Aimee Koran, immediately reads: a house charred from a destructive fire–collapsed, blackened, stuck in the moment after catastrophe. Fire is the most literal forced redirection. Though technically a melted dollhouse, the sculpture evoked familiar news footage of fire-scorched architectural remains in all too many places once loved. As someone who recently fled Los Angeles due to its climate instability and housing crisis, the piece was deafening. Yet, the work’s chrome plating makes it glossy and uncomfortably seductive, like staring into the flames of a fire; transfixed, one can’t easily look away.

Walking into Glenn Goldberg’s show For You is like finding yourself tilted. The paintings hang like rugs that signify an alternative ground–a foundational plane that others the viewer’s perceptible space. Moving through the show, one discovers large vertical paintings, smaller cardboard drawings mounted on wooden panels, and washes of pink, orange, grey, or blue, along with the warp and weft of dots.

For You is an ode to a constant other. Looking at these paintings is like peering into someone’s kitchen, holding a knitted sweater, looking through a window, or counting the rings of a chopped tree trunk–an insight into the ordinary life of a different dimension. The painted specks stand witness to quiet, deliberate acts and patient, intentional choices attuning towards what is present, as if the dots participate in a simple progression that dissolves into an eternal sequence. Spending time in front of these paintings one recognizes an attentive value given to the repetition of dots, shapes, and time–the life of the object. And, like single-point meditation, these paintings invite the onlooker to do the same.

Those familiar with Glenn Goldberg’s work know that he repeats motifs resembling birds, dogs, ducks, bunnies, or a walking figure–the signifying names of these shapes which the artist persistently resists. For You is no different. While one might identify a “bird” motif throughout the gallery, the artist explicitly states, “There are no birds in my work.”1

Like these “birds”, each of Glenn’s paintings offers a form through which one is invited to dissolve into what is in front of them, without given labels, preconceived knowledge, or second-hand assumptions. The work emits porousness, movement, time, and space through its repetition of the ordinary, offering the one who sees mutual listening or simple silence. And this feels kind. Like a dotted antidote that sieves the surplus of other more demanding dots, such as white noise and the monopoly of pixels on a screen.

A “desire path:”2 wandering through Glenn Goldberg’s work is like treading the shortest and most easily navigated route toward a destination of stillness and guileless enchantment. If you attended opening night, it was also a “desire path” towards hot, fresh pupusas!

Idiosyncratic and intrinsically resistant, Glenn Goldberg’s show at Chris Sharp further underscores Sharp’s gift for hosting the inexpressibly wacky and acutely heart-breaking heft of “minor art”3 and an artist living in unassuming singularity.

For You is for you and for you.