When I first arrived at 205 Hudson Gallery in Tribeca for Part 2 of the Hunter College MFA thesis exhibit, I thought I was in over my head and just had no idea. didn’t read enough art theory to decipher what awaited me. This anxiety crept in as I passed through the hallway of the gallery as a circular loudspeaker pumped symphonic melodies between two glass doors, and rose as I entered the silent gallery and had the feels like you’re in a back room simulation of a Bed Bath & Beyond skeletal clearance sale. The exhibition, titled Worms, a good business modelfelt unusually liminal with its low attendance at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday coupled with the stripped-down aesthetic of the works on display compared to the first part of the show a few weeks ago.
But this breathing and the silence that accompanied it reflected the mutual respect shared between this cohort of five artists whose works presented were struggling with the sense of confinement. Through the exhibit’s hands-on text and checklist, I learned that the instrumental debut in the vestibule was artist Liza Lacroix’s compilation of music collected from biopics of famous visual artists, and suddenly, everything wasn’t so serious anymore. And it really wasn’t, because Lacroix told me that the sound installation was inspired by the Getty Center Tram in Los Angeles as well as the queue to get into Universal Studios.
For this exhibition, Lacroix has swapped his brushes and canvases for emotion and intimacy as mediums through sound work. Across the floors of the gallery, Lacroix placed several black and red headphones plugged into MP3 players with the same soundtrack, “Funeral song 1-6,” a lo-fi recording of her singing along to “Let It Loose.” of the Rolling Stones – who performed at her father’s funeral when she was 16 – several times in a row. Even with the voicemail crackle of the audio, the intimacy of the headphones allows me to hear every hitch in Lacroix’s breathing, every wet sniffle, and every crack in his voice as the song plays on repeat. I sat on a transparent holographic square glued to the floor of the gallery and listened to the full, either stunned by this vulnerability or blissfully unaware of my free will to leave this place where I found the MP3 player lying down.
Right: Jared Friedman, “Roses (Red)”, “Roses (Blue)”, “Roses (White)” (2023), acrylic on canvas
“There are so many encores in confined spaces – both public and private,” Jared Friedman told me in a group chat as all the artists were in attendance that day. Large paintings and small sculptures by Friedman, an ode to the insignificant, traced the perimeter of the gallery’s two windowless rooms. Friedman’s fixation with the mundane manifested in confusingly detailed paintings of cinder blocks, public restroom stalls, and takeout containers reinforced with cement casts of the latter. The sculptures were displayed either as prized trophies that deserved great significance, or left out and alone as we usually find their literal counterparts. Friedman materially clogs every nook and cranny of these rendered objects, saturating them with a physical and metaphorical weight that leads us to question our relationship with the neglected and the overproduced.
Along the same lines, the series of welded steel and sag molded glass panel sculpture, Roof of the mouth #1-6 (2023), fossilizes the footprints of the inhabitants of New York. Working on a much smaller scale than usual, Santana imbued her glass with smudges, squiggles and smudges that mimic the greasy smears of human touch before pinching them into her steel scaffolds made in the image of her surroundings. . “Every day I walk through these scaffoldings and construction sites, and take notes and photos of the text and graffiti and even toys left behind,” Santana told me. “And the idea was to melt the glass on top of those shapes and forms to fossilize them so that you don’t see the object, but you see a time when the object was once there.” What I really appreciated was the evidence of Santana’s hand despite the implicit sterility of the materials used.
Rejecting the rectangular binary of a standard canvas, painter Rafael Yaluff embarked on a Sisyphean task of creating irregularly shaped stretchers to attach his canvas. In “Sunset 1” and “Sunset 2” (2023), Yaluff’s meticulously crafted individual stretchers are made up of odd angles, bends, and bumps that eventually come together as an entire rectangular puzzle, which leads me to ask why he went through all that effort in the first place. “I feel very drawn to the unnecessary,” Yaluff told me. “When I paint, I feel like I’m inside this rectangle trying to figure out the image. But if I try to do something with two paintings, I feel like they become objects, and I needed that feeling of freedom.
Kinetic works by designer David Thonis validated the exhibition’s minimalism as their sounds bounced off the gallery’s white walls and concrete floors. With a background in furniture design, Thonis moves away from the rigidity of utilitarianism and approaches the planned obsolescence of material goods through dimensional examinations of futility and worthlessness. There are MDF houses that vibrate on the ground so violently that they crumble, a structure of leaning cedar shelves that rhythmically threatens to fall in front of the wall from a jagged acrylic “wheel” spinning and an amorphous yellow device whose only motion is a slowly spinning disk. This playful futility is also woven into Thonis’ video work by asking the viewer to approach the origins of the conspiracy in the urge to find something out of nothing.
What is fascinating Worms, a good business model is that it is a living and breathing exhibition. Things move, displays change at the whims of artists, and sounds reverberate on the viewer and through the gallery. This initial apprehension I felt dissipated when I considered how the featured work behaved much like organs that make up a body – each performing their own function in support of the success of a whole.
Worms, a good business model will be on view until Tuesday, May 23 at 205 Hudson Gallery in Manhattan. Do yourself a favor and talk to the artists, and don’t forget to look under the stairs :~)
